Cleanness

Cleanness is stunning, provocatively revelatory and atmospherically profound. Here is love and sex as art, as pulse, as truth' - Lisa Taddeo, author of Three WomenSofia, Bulgaria, a landlocked city in southern Europe, stirs with hope and impending upheaval. Soviet buildings crumble, wind scatters sand from the far south, and political protesters flood the streets with song.In this atmosphere of disquiet, an American teacher navigates a life transformed by the discovery and loss of love. As he prepares to leave the place he's come to call home, he grapples with the intimate encounters that have marked his years abroad, each bearing uncanny reminders of his past. A queer student's confession recalls his own first love, a stranger's seduction devolves into paternal sadism, and a romance with a younger man opens, and heals, old wounds. Each echo reveals startling insights about what it means to seek connection: with those we love, with the places we inhabit, and with our own fugitive selves.Cleanness revisits and expands the world of Garth Greenwell's beloved debut, What Belongs to You, declared 'an instant classic' by the New York Times Book Review. In exacting, elegant prose, Greenwell transcribes the strange dialects of desire, cementing his stature as one of our most vital living writers.

“Extraordinary”

Greenwell displays an skill at handling time . . . A piece of bravura writing . . . A style that is both clinically precise and fiercely sensual . . . Exquisite -- Colm Tóibín New York Times Book Review
A brilliant examination of love and intimacy -- SJ Watson The Times
Intense, emotional and super-sexy Sunday Telegraph
Greenwell may be the finest writer of sex currently at work. He is certainly the most exhilarating Times Literary Supplement
Radiant . . . compassion, that supreme quality in a fiction writer, is a main source of Greenwell's power -- Sigrid Nunez New York Review of Books
Incandescent . . . Greenwell has an uncanny gift, one that comes along rarely New York Times
This book is brilliant Observer
Cleanness is wise and illuminating . . . a talented writer of beautiful sentences, and an insightful guide to the strange ways people have of loving each other Guardian
Garth Greenwell has joined the canon of great gay writers . . . enthralling Daily Telegraph
Greenwell is a master of precision: everyday intimacy is so well wrought that it can feel unbearable to read, as if he cuts too close to the skin Financial Times
You should read this book because it contains the year’s most thrilling sex writing -- Katy Waldman New Yorker
Greenwell is a great stylist Spectator
One of the more stunning accounts of sex in literature . . . One puts the book down, and the light feels a bit hotter and the heart stings more sharply White Review
. . . The range in these stories is part of their triumph and part of what makes their existential sorrow so profound . . . Incomparably bittersweet . . . Brilliant -- Ron Charles Washington Post
Garth Greenwell is an intensely beautiful and gorgeous writer. Most American literature seems neutered by comparison -- Sheila Heti, author of Motherhood
Stunning, provocatively revelatory and atmospherically profound. Here is love and sex as art, as pulse, as truth -- Lisa Taddeo, author of Three Women
An impressive book: moving, radical, both beautiful and violent, unexpected. Garth Greenwell is a major writer, and his writing provides us tools to affirm ourselves, to exist – to fight -- Édouard Louis, author of The End of Eddy
So rarely do words make comprehensible the inevitability and confusion of desire and determination as Garth Greenwell's writing does. Cleanness captures the indefinableness of pain and intimacy, love and alienation, vulnerability and sustainability -- Yiyun Li, author of The Vagrants
I don't know how Garth Greenwell writes such delicate, profane fiction. Reading this book made me want to sit with my emotions and desires; it made me want to be a better writer -- Carmen Maria Machado, author of Her Body and Other Parties
A novel of devastating honesty and beauty -- David Ebershoff, author of The Danish Girl
I loved Cleanness. It's a page-turning love story if you read it for that; it's a lambent, thought-provoking intervention on desire and others' knowability if you read it for that; and if you read it for both, you'll get the best of it. 10/10 -- Naoise Dolan, author of Exciting Times
An unbearably wonderful, eloquently sexual, thoughtful, emotional delight of a novel – Garth Greenwell writes like no one else -- Eimear McBride, author of A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing
This is an exceptional work of fiction, which places Greenwell among the very best contemporary novelists The i

Garth Greenwell is a graduate of the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop, where he was an Arts Fellow. His novella Mitko won the 2010 Miami University Press Novella Prize and was a finalist for the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction and a Lambda Literary Award.

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