This book is quietly brilliant and difficult to forget. At the end I hung my head and cried right along with him. My heart broke for Mitko, this child of the post-Soviet era doing whatever it took to survive in a place no doubt unrecognizable even to him.but my heart also broke for our narrator and his scars that could not and will not heal. Regardless of skill level, there are nuances and mysteries that simply cannot be translated to the non-native speaker and coupling that with cultural differences, there is an enormous challenge presented in a perfect world. The author masterfully depicted the challenges of communicating in a foreign language when it comes to relationships. This story epitomizes the viscosity that comes from a relationship that is impossible to clearly define. The narrator deftly describes every piece of himself, his surroundings, and this unique, surreal relationship built on foreign words that have more than one meaning, sustained by desire and mutual needs that couldn't be more different. Every chapter ends in a way that is either intentional or sheer magic.I will let you decide. Skip just one and you will be clambering backwards trying to piece things together. Sentences masterfully crafted, each packed with information and emotion. The writing is dense and rich, with long sentences (littered with punctuation) that demand to be read and re-read. There is too much here for it not to be based in truth. If this is truly fiction, this author ranks among the best. 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 disease. 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