What Belongs To You: A Novel
by Garth Greenwell
Buy on Amazon"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.…
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"I sat down to read a chapter of What Belongs to You one afternoon and ended up reading the whole thing in one sitting, hunched over my kitchen table until dark. Garth Greenwell’s devastatingly beautiful novel about a gay American expat in Bulgaria and his on-again, off-again relationship with a sex worker named Mitko has been one of the year’s breakout hits, and for good reason. It’s a virtuosic, tender exploration of loneliness and desire, with sentences so breathtaking you’ll find yourself returning to them over and over again."
NPR Books We Love — 2016 · apps.npr.org