Obscure object of desire

Garth Greenwell’s debut novel is as dreary and oppressive as the Soviet-era apartment buildings among which it takes place. But presumably this was intentional. Having grown up in a rural backwater where ‘disease was the only story anyone ever told about men like me’, the book’s American narrator, a teacher in Sofia, seeks to escape shame and tedium by having sex with random men in the toilets beneath the National Palace of Culture. ‘It wasn’t so much pleasure I sought as the exhilaration of setting aside restraint,’ he says: ‘a thrill so intense it was almost suicidal.’

It is here that he meets Mitko, a skinny, covetous Bulgarian whose increasingly desperate interventions in the narrator’s life provide the structure of the book as well as its most memorable writing. At its core, What Belongs to You is an exploration of desire. It questions how purely transactional sex can ever be, even when it’s paid for.