Real Life

Wallace, a queer Black Ph.D. student in biochemistry, navigates a fraught weekend in an overwhelmingly white Midwestern university town. When his meticulously bred nematodes are contaminated and his father’s death goes unmourned, Wallace’s tightly controlled world begins to unravel; moments of loneliness, desire, and betrayal crack his careful facade. Told with relentless intimacy, emotional clarity, and scientific precision, Real Life is a quiet yet powerful story of isolation, longing, and what it costs to be an outsider in academic—and human—spaces.

~ Included for its unflinching depiction of queer Black precarity, grief, and desire amid academic pressures, and for redefining the campus novel through a lens of raw, lived experience. A deeply affecting, boundary‑challenging debut that belongs on every shelf. ~