
Real Life
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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Kevin R. Free
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By:
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Brandon Taylor
About this listen
2020 Booker Prize short-listed
2020 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize long-listed
2021 Lambda Literary Award short-listed
2020 National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize short-listed
2021 VCU Cabell First Novelist Prize short-listed
2021 Young Lions Award short-listed
A Finalist for the Booker Prize, the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, the VCU/Cabell First Novelist Prize, the Lambda Literary Award, the NYPL Young Lions Award, and the Edmund White Debut Fiction Award
"A blistering coming of age story." (O: The Oprah Magazine)
Named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, New York Public Library, Vanity Fair, Elle, NPR, The Guardian, The Paris Review, Harper's Bazaar, Financial Times, Huffington Post, BBC, Shondaland, Barnes & Noble, Vulture, Thrillist, Vice, Self, Electric Literature, and Shelf Awareness
A novel of startling intimacy, violence, and mercy among friends in a Midwestern university town, from an electric new voice.
Almost everything about Wallace is at odds with the Midwestern university town where he is working uneasily toward a biochem degree. An introverted young man from Alabama, black and queer, he has left behind his family without escaping the long shadows of his childhood. For reasons of self-preservation, Wallace has enforced a wary distance even within his own circle of friends—some dating each other, some dating women, some feigning straightness. But over the course of a late-summer weekend, a series of confrontations with colleagues, and an unexpected encounter with an ostensibly straight, white classmate, conspire to fracture his defenses while exposing long-hidden currents of hostility and desire within their community.
Real Life is a novel of profound and lacerating power, a story that asks if it’s ever really possible to overcome our private wounds, and at what cost.
©2020 Brandon Taylor (P)2020 Penguin AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
"[A] stunning debut...Taylor proves himself to be a keen observer of the psychology of not just trauma, but its repercussions.... There is a delicacy in the details of working in a lab full of microbes and pipettes that dances across the pages like the feet of a Cunningham dancer: pure, precise poetry." (Jeremy O. Harris, The New York Times Book Review)
"Equal parts captivating, erotic, smart and vivid...[rendered] with tenderness and complexity, from the first gorgeous sentence of his book to its very last...Taylor is also tackling loneliness, desire and - more than anything—finding purpose, meaning and happiness in one’s own life." (Time)
"[Real Life is] a sophisticated character study of someone squaring self-preservation with a duty to tolerate people who threaten it. The book teems with passages of transfixing description, and perhaps its greatest asset is the force of Wallace’s isolation, which Taylor conveys with alien strangeness." (The New Yorker)
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Story
Two young people meet at a pub in South East London. Both are Black British, both won scholarships to private schools where they struggled to belong, both are now artists - he a photographer, she a dancer - trying to make their mark in a city that by turns celebrates and rejects them. Tentatively, tenderly, they fall in love. But two people who seem destined to be together can still be torn apart by fear and violence.
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Second person POV releases poignant perspective
- By Storytellersrus on 09-25-21
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Memorial
- A GMA Book Club Pick (A Novel)
- By: Bryan Washington
- Narrated by: Bryan Washington, Akie Kotabe
- Length: 8 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Benson and Mike are two young guys who live together in Houston. Mike is a Japanese-American chef at a Mexican restaurant and Benson's a Black day-care teacher, and they've been together for a few years - good years - but now they're not sure why they're still a couple. There's the sex, sure, and the meals Mike cooks for Benson, and, well, they love each other. But when Mike finds out his estranged father is dying in Osaka just as his acerbic Japanese mother, Mitsuko, arrives in Texas for a visit, Mike picks up and flies across the world to say good-bye.
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I just couldn’t connect.
- By SBB on 11-15-20
By: Bryan Washington
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What Belongs to You
- A Novel
- By: Garth Greenwell
- Narrated by: Garth Greenwell
- Length: 6 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
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.
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Too short
- By Paul on 05-31-24
By: Garth Greenwell
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Cleanness
- By: Garth Greenwell
- Narrated by: Garth Greenwell
- Length: 7 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Sofia, Bulgaria, a landlocked city in southern Europe, stirs with hope and impending upheaval. Soviet buildings crumble, wind scatters sand from the far south, and political protesters flood the streets with song. In this atmosphere of disquiet, an American teacher navigates a life transformed by the discovery and loss of love. As he prepares to leave the place he's come to call home, he grapples with the intimate encounters that have marked his years abroad, each bearing uncanny reminders of his past.
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Great narrator.
- By Michael Payne on 03-08-20
By: Garth Greenwell
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Filthy Animals
- By: Brandon Taylor
- Narrated by: Kevin R. Free, Nicole Lewis, TL Thompson
- Length: 7 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In the series of linked stories at the heart of Filthy Animals, set among young creatives in the American Midwest, a young man treads delicate emotional waters as he navigates a series of sexually fraught encounters with two dancers in an open relationship, forcing him to weigh his vulnerabilities against his loneliness.
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Painful to finish
- By Amy L Rowinski on 03-11-23
By: Brandon Taylor
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Evenings and Weekends
- A Novel
- By: Oisín McKenna
- Narrated by: Isabel Adomakoh-Young
- Length: 9 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Summer in London stops for no one. Not the half-naked drunks and stoners, the bachelorette parties glugging from bejewelled bottles, the drag queens puffing on hurried cigarettes. It’s June 2019, and everyone has converged on the city’s parks, beer gardens, and street corners to revel in the collective joys of being alive. Everyone but Maggie. She’s 30, pregnant, and broke.
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Amazing Narration
- By Kristen on 03-12-25
By: Oisín McKenna
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There There
- A Novel
- By: Tommy Orange
- Narrated by: Darrell Dennis, Shaun Taylor-Corbett, Alma Ceurvo, and others
- Length: 8 hrs
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Jacquie Red Feather is newly sober and trying to make it back to the family she left behind in shame. Dene Oxendene is pulling his life back together after his uncle's death and has come to work at the powwow to honor his uncle's memory. Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield has come to watch her nephew Orvil, who has taught himself traditional Indian dance through YouTube videos and will perform in public for the very first time. There will be glorious communion and a spectacle of sacred tradition and pageantry. And there will be sacrifice, and heroism, and loss.
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Highly recommend.
- By Rachel S on 07-09-18
By: Tommy Orange
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The Ravens
- The Ravens, Book 1
- By: Kass Morgan, Danielle Paige
- Narrated by: Sophie Amoss
- Length: 11 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
At first glance, the sisters of ultra-exclusive Kappa Rho Nu - the Ravens - seem like typical sorority girls. Ambitious, beautiful, and smart, they’re the most powerful girls on Westerly College’s Savannah, Georgia, campus. But the Ravens aren’t just regular sorority girls. They’re witches.
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Great Read!
- By Mel on 01-30-21
By: Kass Morgan, and others
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Young Mungo
- By: Douglas Stuart
- Narrated by: Chris Reilly
- Length: 13 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Born under different stars—Mungo a Protestant and James a Catholic—they should be sworn enemies if they’re to be seen as men at all. Their environment is a hyper-masculine and sectarian one, for gangs of young men and the violence they might dole out dominate the Glaswegian estate where they live. And yet against all odds Mungo and James become best friends as they find a sanctuary in the pigeon dovecote that James has built for his prize racing birds.
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Suffering Sappho!
- By Richard Stewart on 04-12-22
By: Douglas Stuart
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Madam
- A Novel
- By: Phoebe Wynne
- Narrated by: Nathalie Buscombe
- Length: 13 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
For 150 years, high above rocky Scottish cliffs, Caldonbrae Hall has sat untouched, a beacon of excellence in an old ancestral castle. A boarding school for girls, it promises that the young women lucky enough to be admitted will emerge “resilient and ready to serve society.” Into its illustrious midst steps Rose Christie: a 26-year-old Classics teacher, Caldonbrae’s new head of the department, and the first hire for the school in over a decade.
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Ridiculous!
- By DJA on 06-17-21
By: Phoebe Wynne
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Monstrilio
- By: Gerardo Sámano Córdova
- Narrated by: Victoria Villarreal, Johnny Rey Diaz
- Length: 7 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Grieving mother Magos cuts out a piece of her deceased eleven-year-old son Santiago's lung. Acting on fierce maternal instinct and the dubious logic of an old folktale, she nurtures the lung until it gains sentience, growing into the carnivorous little Monstrilio she keeps hidden within the walls of her family's decaying Mexico City estate. Eventually, Monstrilio begins to resemble the Santiago he once was, but his innate impulses—though curbed by his biological and chosen family's communal care—threaten to destroy this fragile second chance at life.
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Not exactly what I expected….
- By kisa on 10-06-23
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These Violent Delights
- A Novel
- By: Micah Nemerever
- Narrated by: Michael Crouch
- Length: 14 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
When Paul enters university in early 1970s Pittsburgh, it’s with the hope of moving past the recent death of his father. Sensitive, insecure, and incomprehensible to his grieving family, Paul feels isolated and alone. When he meets the worldly Julian in his freshman ethics class, Paul is immediately drawn to his classmate’s effortless charm. Paul sees Julian as his sole intellectual equal — an ally against the conventional world he finds so suffocating.
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Excellent book. Hated it.
- By Abby on 06-18-21
By: Micah Nemerever
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The Cloisters
- A Novel
- By: Katy Hays
- Narrated by: Emily Tremaine
- Length: 10 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
When Ann Stilwell arrives in New York City, she expects to spend her summer working as a curatorial associate at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Instead, she finds herself assigned to The Cloisters, a gothic museum and garden renowned for its medieval art collection and its group of enigmatic researchers studying the history of divination. Desperate to escape her painful past, Ann is happy to indulge the researchers’ more outlandish theories about the history of fortune telling.
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I guess no one is honest now that’s cool
- By Housepants97 on 11-07-22
By: Katy Hays
Intriguing
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Beautiful
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Impressions of Taylor's Real Life
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Heartbreaking
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The Good: We have to start with Kevin R. Free. As usual he gives a stellar performance. He knows how to use emotion in his voice without making it too campy. The writing in this novel is beautiful. The words and description leaves nothing to the imagination. For a debut book I think this author has a lot to offer his readers.
The Bad: My biggest gripe with this book is the ending. If you are the type that needs a satisfying ending...or any kind of ending, this isn't the book for you. I honestly felt like we got to this big build up where the characters were going to finally make choices, like a person would do in Real Life, and then it just ended. And because the author has a tendency to jump backwards into the past to explain current characters, characteristics, or relationships I had no idea where the book ended was where it was going to end or needed to end. It felt empty. This isn't the type of book you can just make up your own mind where the story goes from the end.
indifferent
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Chilling, Excellent
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I read this book for Kid Cudi
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Great prose, tedious plot
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Real Life
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This is a brilliantly written book. Brandon Taylor's pacing and variation throughout are beautifully done. the story moves well, great pace and details - and he is a master of drawing readers into key moments with a slowing down and focusing in on specific parts of a scene. I enjoyed all of this book - and admire his skill in maneuvering through important current events and issues in this book. I particularly love his scenes involving water and food; some of those places I reread/relistened to, as a writer and not just a reader - I know I've already said this - but he is a master of this moving in and out, speeding us up and slowing us down, writing through the body, heart, entire being.
I enjoyed the narration for the audio version. there was enough variation of character voices to know who was who, but it was not too much to be distracting. His voice is clear, matched the story well, good to listen to. very well done.
I highly recommend this book.
Masterful storytelling and narration
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