Violet Hour Book Club Toronto Edition: What Belongs to You
About this Event
Join us for the fifth meeting of the Toronto edition of the Violet Hour Book Club (VHBC), a reading and discussion group dedicated to exploring classic and contemporary 2S/LGBTQ+ literature.
Our next selection is Garth Greenwall's "What Belongs To You".
Founded in Montreal in 2019, VHBC has become an important gathering space for queer book lovers in the city, fostering meaningful connections through a shared appreciation of foundational classics and bold, contemporary voices. The club provides an inclusive environment for lively, thought-provoking conversations on books, literary culture, and the craft of storytelling – cultivating dialogue that is both intellectually stimulating and deeply personal.
Everyone is welcome. Copies of the book will be available for guests at a 10% discount with the promo code VHBC. Please order online at anotherstory.ca.
About the book
On an unseasonably warm autumn day, an American teacher enters a public bathroom beneath Sofia’s National Palace of Culture. There he meets Mitko, a charismatic young hustler, and pays him for sex. He returns to Mitko again and again over the next few months, drawn by hunger and loneliness and risk, and finds himself ensnared in a relationship in which lust leads to mutual predation, and tenderness can transform into violence. As he struggles to reconcile his longing with the anguish it creates, he’s forced to grapple with his own fraught history, the world of his southern childhood where to be queer was to be a pariah. There are unnerving similarities between his past and the foreign country he finds himself in, a country whose geography and griefs he discovers as he learns more of Mitko’s own narrative, his private history of illness, exploitation, and want.
What Belongs to You is a stunning debut novel of desire and its consequences. With lyric intensity and startling eroticism, Garth Greenwell has created an indelible story about the ways in which our pasts and cultures, our scars and shames can shape who we are and determine how we love.
Garth Greenwell is the author of What Belongs to You, which won the British Book Award for Debut of the Year, was longlisted for the National Book Award, and was a finalist for six other awards, including the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, it was named a Best Book of 2016 by over fifty publications in nine countries, and is being translated into a dozen languages. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, A Public Space, and VICE, and he has written criticism for The New Yorker, the London Review of Books, and the New York Times Book Review, among others. He lives in Iowa City.
Where is it happening?
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