What Belongs to You

Written by Garth Greenwell

Narrated by Garth Greenwell

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pan Macmillan
• Release date: Apr 20, 2017
• ISBN: 9781509838813

Garth Greenwell

Garth Greenwell is the author of What Belongs to You, which won the British Book Award for Debut of the Year, was longlisted for the National Book Award, and was a finalist for six other awards, including the PEN/Faulkner Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, it was named a Best Book of 2016 by over fifty publications in nine countries, and is being translated into more than a dozen languages. His second book of fiction, Cleanness, was published in 2020. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, A Public Space, and VICE, and he has written criticism for The New Yorker, the London Review of Books, and The New York Times Book Review, among others. A 2020 Guggenheim Fellow, he lives in Iowa City. 

Reviews for What Belongs to You

[Kelechi Njoku · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I loved this. Simple and beautifully observed, the narrative toothpicks the tiny, wispy crevice between love and lust.