Brought to you by Penguin.

Hello and welcome to the Penguin.

Where we talk to writers about writing.

I'm Izzy Suttie and today I'm going to be

talking to Brandon Taylor, a best-selling author, whose novel Real Life was shortlisted for the Booker

Prize, the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, and named a New York Times book review

editor's choice. He has been described as one of our most perceptive chroniclers of contemporary

life and his latest novel, The Late Americans, is a story of intimacy and precarity, friendship and

chosen family set in Iowa City in the American Midwest. Brandon, I'm so delighted to have the

opportunity to chat with you today. Welcome to the Penguin podcast.

Thank you for having me. I finished the book last night. I absolutely loved it and I feel like the characters are going to stay with me for such a long time.

It's so funny, first of all, which I'll come on to. The way I described it to my partner, it's like an unflinching look at a group of mainly young, at least

to me, because I'm 44 people negotiating their lives through the prism of art, class, money,

desire. And I love the way that with each chapter you kind of focus in. It's like you kind of

move into a story and there'll

be minor characters in that chapter who then appear maybe in the next chapter or maybe a few

chapters later. So for me it works as a whole story and it also works as these kind of intersecting

different plates like tectonic plates kind of shifting against one another.

It feels so alive.

Most of them are in education or post-education in Iowa,

but a few of the characters are from the town like Theodore,

who works in a meatpacking plant and Bert, who's a local property owner.

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