What Belongs to You

Winner of the British Book Awards Debut of the Year 2017 Shortlisted for the James Tait Black Prize 2017 'What Belongs to You stands naturally alongside the great works of compromised sexual obsession such as Thomas Mann's Death in Venice... an essential work of our time' - Daily Telegraph  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, their relationship growing increasingly intimate and unnerving. As he struggles to reconcile his longing with the anguish it creates, he's forced to grapple with his own fraught history: his formative experiences of love, his painful rejection by family and friends, and the difficulty of growing up as a gay man in southern America in the 1990s. Startlingly erotic and immensely powerful, What Belongs to You tells an unforgettable story about the ways our pasts and cultures, our scars and shames can shape who we are and determine how we love.