Reader Score
79%
79% of readers
recommend this book
Critic Reviews
Great
Based on 16 reviews on
Longlisted for the National Book Award in Fiction - A Finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction - A Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction - A Finalist for the James Taite Black Prize for Fiction - A Finalist the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize - A Finalist for the Green Carnation Prize - A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice - A Los Angeles Times Bestseller
Named One of the Best Books of the Year by More Than Fifty Publications, Including: The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The New York Times (selected by Dwight Garner), GQ, The Washington Post, Esquire, NPR, Slate, Vulture, the San Francisco Chronicle, The Guardian (London), The Telegraph (London), The Evening Standard (London), The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Miami Herald, The Millions, BuzzFeed, The New Republic (Best Debuts of the Year), Kirkus Reviews, and Publishers Weekly (One of the Ten Best Books of the Year)
"Garth Greenwell's What Belongs to You appeared in early 2016, and is a short first novel by a young writer; still, it was not easily surpassed by anything that appeared later in the year....It is not just first novelists who will be envious of Greenwell's achievement."--James Wood, The New Yorker
"A rich, important debut, an instant classic to be savored by all lovers of serious fiction because of, not despite, its subject: a gay man's endeavor to fathom his own heart."--Aaron Hamburger, The New York Times Book Review
"In an age of the sentence fetish, Greenwell thinks and writes, as Woolf or Sebald do, in larger units of comprehension....Brilliantly self-aware...Greenwell's novel impresses for many reasons, not least of which is how perfectly it fulfills its intentions. But it gains a different power from its uneasy atmosphere of psychic instability, of confession and penitence, of difficult forces acknowledged but barely mastered and beyond the conscious control of even this gifted novelist."--James Wood, The New Yorker