The Booker Prize finalist and widely acclaimed author of REAL LIFE and FILTHY ANIMALS returns with a deeply involving new novel of young men and women at a crossroads.

In the shared and private spaces of Iowa City, a loose circle of lovers and friends encounter, confront and provoke one another in a volatile year of self-discovery. At the group’s center are Ivan, a dancer turned aspiring banker who dabbles in amateur pornography; Fatima, whose independence and work ethic complicates her relationships with friends and a trusted mentor; and Noah, who “didn’t seek sex out so much as it came up to him like an anxious dog in need of affection.”

These three are buffeted by a cast of poets, artists, landlords, meat-packing workers and mathematicians who populate the cafes, classrooms and food-service kitchens of Iowa City, sometimes to violent and electrifying consequence. Finally, as each prepares for an uncertain future, the group heads to a cabin to bid goodbye to their former lives --- a moment of reckoning that leaves each of them irrevocably altered.

A novel of friendship and chosen family, THE LATE AMERICANS asks fresh questions about love and sex, ambition and precarity, and about how human beings can bruise one another while trying to find themselves. It is Brandon Taylor’s richest and most involving work of fiction to date, confirming his position as one of our most perceptive chroniclers of contemporary life.

Audiobook available, read by Kevin R. Free