Publisher's Synopsis
Con un inusual virtuosismo estilìstico y una cautivadora potencia emocional, esta novela sobre el deseo y sus consecuencias está destinada a convertirse en un clásico.
El espléndido debut de Greenwell ha sido merecedor del British Book Prize, nominado al National Book Award y seleccionado como uno de los mejores libros del año por los principales medios de comunicación estadounidenses. En los baños públicos del Palacio Nacional de Cultura de Sofìa, un profesor de literatura estadounidense conoce a Mitko, un joven magnético a quien paga por sexo. Movido por un deseo incontenible, regresa a Mitko una y otra vez tratando de descifrar la historia personal del joven, marcada por los excesos y la incomprensión de un mundo que apenas le presta atención, pero solo consigue verse atrapado en una relación donde la ternura y el anhelo dan paso a la humillación y al miedo.
Mientras lucha por reconciliarse con sus propios sentimientos, una noticia inesperada le fuerza a evocar su traumática adolescencia y la tensa relación con su padre, en una América profunda que tiene similitudes desconcertantes con esta Bulgaria gris y decadente donde ha decidido instalarse.
Lo que te pertenece es una historia indeleble que se mueve por los sombrìos rincones de una sociedad marcada por el comunismo y que ahonda en las cicatrices y las culpabilidades del pasado, esas marcas que pueden decidir quiénes somos y cómo amamos.
ENGLISH DESCRIPTION
Longlisted for the National Book Award in Fiction
A Finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction A Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction
A Finalist for the James Taite Black Prize for Fiction
A Finalist the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize
A Finalist for the Green Carnation Prize
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice
A Los Angeles Times Bestseller
Named One of the Best Books of the Year by More Than Fifty Publications, Including: The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The New York Times (selected by Dwight Garner), GQ, The Washington Post, Esquire, NPR, Slate, Vulture, the San Francisco Chronicle, The Guardian (London), The Telegraph (London), The Evening Standard (London), The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Miami Herald, The Millions, BuzzFeed, The New Republic (Best Debuts of the Year), Kirkus Reviews, and Publishers Weekly (One of the Ten Best Books of the Year)
"Garth Greenwell's What Belongs to You appeared in early 2016, and is a short first novel by a young writer; still, it was not easily surpassed by anything that appeared later in the year....It is not just first novelists who will be envious of Greenwell's achievement."?James Wood, The New Yorker
On an unseasonably warm autumn day, an American teacher enters a public bathroom beneath Sofia's National Palace of Culture. There he meets Mitko, a charismatic young hustler, and pays him for sex. He returns to Mitko again and again over the next few months, drawn by hunger and loneliness and risk, and finds himself ensnared in a relationship in which lust leads to mutual predation, and tenderness can transform into violence. As he struggles to reconcile his longing with the anguish it creates, he's forced to grapple with his own fraught history, the world of his southern childhood where to be queer was to be a pariah. There are unnerving similarities between his past and the foreign country he finds himself in, a country whose geography and griefs he discovers as he learns more of Mitko's own narrative, his private history of illness, exploitation, and want.
What Belongs to You is a stunning debut novel of desire and its consequences. With lyric intensity and startling eroticism, Garth Greenwell has created an indelible story about the ways in which our pasts and cultures, our scars and shames can shape who we are and determine how we love.
