What Belongs to You

Alienation. I added Garth Greenwell’s debut novel titled, What Belongs to You, to my reading queue after it was longlisted for the National Book Award. Within two hundred finely written pages, Greenwell offers a complex psychological novel that he presents using exquisite prose. The narrator is a young American gay man living in Bulgaria teaching English. He visits a public restroom and pays for sex with Mitko, a young Bulgarian man of limited means. Greenwell draws readers into patterns of desire, shame, obsession, loneliness and most of all alienation. However Greenwell does it, love and disgust can be in the same paragraph and a reader can remain interested and involved in this complicated relationship. Rating: Four-star (I like it) Click here to purchase What Belongs to You from amazon.com.