The disgust that the narrator’s father expresses when he discovers his son’s sexuality – voiced in a wish that his son had never been born – propels the narrator to seek relationships as an adult in which he is subjugated, ashamed, pitied.

The expansive middle section, triggered by a letter requesting the narrator to make a final visit to his dying father, takes us back to the narrator’s childhood and his experiences of that underside of desire, shame. The first part of the book tells of the narrator’s growing obsession with Mitko and their subsequent separation at a Bulgarian seaside resort. What Belongs to You tells the story of an unnamed American who, cruising the toilets underneath the National Palace in Sofia, meets a street hustler named Mitko. He shows us hustlers on the make, rent boys obsessed with the latest Apple gadgets the spectre of syphilis and a chronic lack of penicillin and residents with a constant desire to flee. But instead of beautiful art, architecture, and Tuscan vistas, Greenwell depicts life in decaying Soviet-era apartment blocks. In his first book, What Belongs to You (2016), the narrator – an American teacher of English, and aspiring poet and writer – goes to live in Sofia and, like James’s Isabel Archer, experience life. Unlike these predecessors, who stage an encounter with the more familiar settings of western Europe (Paris, Rome, Florence), Greenwell’s meeting is with post-Communist Bulgaria.

Garth Greenwell’s great subject is the New World’s encounter with Europe and his question: ‘how do you love in the face of shame?’ Greenwell sits in a long lineage of fictional transatlanticism, notably tracked by Henry James and Edmund White.

Cleanness garth greenwell