The author of the Booker-shortlisted Real Life returns with a deeply involving new novel of young men and women at a crossroads.

In a university town in the American Midwest a circle of lovers and friends navigate tangled webs of connection as they try to work out what they want, and who they are. Seamus, Fyodor, Ivan, Noah and Fatima are running out of time to decide on their futures, each of them faced with decisions that will complicate and compromise their visions of themselves.

As they test their own desires in a series of relationships they are confronted by volatile figures in town, from an unruly, vulnerable young poets to a local landlord harbouring a lifetime of resentment. The friends ask themselves and each other, what is the right thing to stake a life on: work, love, money, dance, poetry? Is love possible without harm? And what does true connection look like in an age of precarity?

‘Tender and unflinching…a wonderful book’ Colin Barrett, author of Homesickness

‘Taylor is a sharp chronicler of the body’ Raven Leilani, author of Luster

‘A glimmering study of young humans in brutal times’ Jeremy Atherton Lin, author of Gay Bar