What Belongs to You: A Novel
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Longlisted for the National Book Award in Fiction
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.
A conversation between Garth Greenwell and Hanya Yanagihara is included inside the e-book edition.
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Garth Greenwell. (2016). What Belongs to You: A Novel. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Chicago / Turabian - Author Date Citation (style guide)Garth Greenwell. 2016. What Belongs to You: A Novel. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Chicago / Turabian - Humanities Citation (style guide)Garth Greenwell, What Belongs to You: A Novel. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016.
MLA Citation (style guide)Garth Greenwell. What Belongs to You: A Novel. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016.
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- bioText: Garth Greenwell is the author of What Belongs to You, which won the British Book Award for Debut of the Year, was longlisted for the National Book Award, and was a finalist for six other awards, including the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice, it was named a Best Book of 2016 by over fifty publications in nine countries, and is being translated into a dozen languages. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, A Public Space, and VICE, and he has written criticism for The New Yorker, the London Review of Books, and the New York Times Book Review, among others. He lives in Iowa City.
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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 for the Green Carnation Prize
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.
A conversation between Garth Greenwell and Hanya Yanagihara is included inside the e-book edition.- reviews
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- source: Gabe Habash, Publishers Weekly
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"The first great novel of 2016 . . . Greenwell's ability to parse the complex emotional push-and-pull . . . is incredible, and rivals books like Hanya Yanagihara's A Little Life or Ferrante's Neapolitan novels . . . The ending will probably destroy you (if I remember correctly, my reaction was something like a pained "Oh."). And in Mitko, Greenwell has created one of the best characters in recent years. What Belongs to You is a great tragedy, and Greenwell is a great writer. I'll be reading whatever he writes next."
- premium: False
- source: Christopher Bollen, Interview
- content: "A triumph . . . the novel takes its place on a rare shelf of fiction that includes James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room and Andre Aciman's Call Me by Your Name . . . Greenwell's gorgeous, roaming prose untangles questions of transaction, identity, cruelty, and just how much of knowing a stranger is willful invention."
- premium: False
- source: Edmund White, author of Jack Holmes and His Friend
- content: "With What Belongs to You, American literature is richer by one masterpiece. The character Mitko is unforgettable, as all myths are. He reigns at the heart of this book, surrounded by the magic flames of desire."
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Starred review from October 5, 2015
With detailed prose, Greenwell’s debut relays the story of an unnamed American college professor, living and teaching in Bulgaria, who develops a sexual relationship with a nomadic male prostitute named Mitko. Initially meeting in public bathroom stalls at the National Palace of Culture in Sofia, the pair shift their dates to the professor’s apartment and eventually decide to travel to Varna, Mitko’s hometown on the Black Sea, for a brief respite. However, Mitko’s violent side leaves Greenwell’s protagonist afraid for his own safety. The two part ways, and years pass before Mitko, ravaged by time and homelessness, reenters the professor’s life. Now in a committed long-distance relationship, the instructor battles his erotic yearning and faces increasing discomfort around his former lover, suspecting the prostitute’s acts of kindness and care are nothing more than a lure for financial support. The book breaks up the adult protagonist’s story with a long middle section devoted to exploring the professor’s difficult childhood, as well as his first love, and it is here that the man’s struggles—sexual and emotional—come alive. Greenwell’s novel is a brave and articulate psychological exploration of lust and desire, and though his rich language often carries the book (rather than the plot), the carnal pain on display is striking.
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Starred review from October 15, 2015
The life of an American expat living in Bulgaria intersects repeatedly with that of a young gay hustler in this gorgeous debut novel from Greenwell. The unnamed narrator--an English teacher who lives in the city of Sofia--has an addiction, and that addiction's name is Mitko. After they meet for the first time in a public bathroom, Mitko flits in and out of the narrator's life with abandon, alternating among offers of sex, hints at love, threats, blackmail, hunger, illness, neediness, rage, and despair. Mitko is beautiful, self-assured, and an enigma, and the narrator finds it hard to resist him. His growth is in his responses, which range from acquiescence to refusal, and it is this engine that propels the reader forward through a series of tenuously connected chapters that advance in irregular chronological intervals. This is a novel with a short story sensibility; many of the chapters stand on their own, hanging together only in the loosest sense. This is a feature, not a bug: instead of aggressively pursuing a series of tightly woven plotlines, readers may have the sense that they're peering through the narrator's window randomly and of their own free will, observing his latest state each time. As for the narrator, he can only move forward if he interrogates his past--the question is, will he be able to? The prose here is supple and responsive, and Sofia teems with beauty and decay. Mitko lights up scenes like a firecracker and haunts the ones where he's absent--a large segment of the novel where he does not appear still vibrates with his energy--but the protagonist too is a source of gentle, steady illumination as he grapples with his cravings, memories, fears, and grief. This is a project of rare discernment and beauty, and it is not to be missed. A luminous, searing exploration of desire, alienation, and the powerful tattoo of the past.COPYRIGHT(2015) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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August 1, 2015
This sexually frank, deeply felt, and admirably constructed first novel takes us into a general culture most American readers will have no familiarity withcontemporary Bulgariaand, further, into a subset of that culture that will be completely foreign to such readers, the gay netherworld of the capital city, Sofia. The opening scenethe novel is told in first personintroduces us to the two participants and sets the tone that will reign throughout. The narrator, a gay American expat who teaches in a Sofia school, seeks sexual trade in the bathroom of the National Palace of Culture, where one day he encounters a hustler named Mitko. Immediately attracted tono, mesmerized byMitko, the two men fall into an uneasy relationship. Mitko is out for what he can get from the rich American. The narrator longs for intimacy, an abiding urge that stems from the rejection he felt as a boy from his father. This provocative tale rests on the themeto which we can all respondof the human need for possession, both emotional and sexual.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)
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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 for the Green Carnation Prize
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