I'm very surprised to see it left off the Man Booker long list for this year to me it's definitely one of the highlights of the past year and won't soon be forgotten. Forster's 'Maurice', and with the novels of Alan Hollinghurst and David Leavitt. There has been much praise calling Greenwell's book 'The Great Gay Novel'. I'm deeply fond of Garth Greenwell's creation as told by Piter Marek, whose narration is intimate, sincere and perfect. Audio seems the perfect format in which to experience these authors. They often bring a lyricism to their storytelling that weaves well with the audio form.

Lately, poet-novelists such as Garth Greenwell are forming the base of my favourite contemporary storytellers. Greenwell fearlessly confronts the difficulties of a young gay man coming to know himself with a genuineness that is humbling to the reader. Thereafter follows a period of self reflection which includes recollections shameful, humiliating, and alienating.

Initially the two develop an intense relationship that exists at the axes of shame and desire. There he meets and becomes infatuated with a young man named Mitko. A young American man is working as a teacher in Bulgaria. His novel is a profound dissection of a character caught between desire and morality. Garth Greenwell's quiet but urgent style is superb and this, his debut, is stunning in every respect. 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.

What Belongs to You is a stunning debut novel of desire and its consequences. 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. 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. 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. There he meets Mitko, a charismatic young hustler, and pays him for sex. On an unseasonably warm autumn day, an American teacher enters a public bathroom beneath Sofia's National Palace of Culture.

What Belongs to You by Garth Greenwell