Lot

I’m the greediest kind of fiction reader, because I want it all. I want a book that grabs me in a headlock and won’t let me put it down without a fight. I want a book with characters and conflicts that pull me in. I want a book that haunts me long after I’ve read its final page. I want it to let me see the world in a fresh way that’s been there the whole time yet has eluded me so far. And I got all this, and more, from Bryan Washington’s Lot.

Lot is a linked collection of stories that reads like a novel. Connected largely by a central, unnamed young man who carries the reader on his shoulders, it’s a portrait of the far back corner of Lockwood, a diverse, working-class neighborhood in Houston, Texas. A place where families struggle with how to be their true selves and survive at the same time. But Lot’s so much more than that.

The best way I can describe this book is that it’s alive. You don’t read Lot: It speaks to you, through a voice on the page so real, so intimate, you can almost hear it breathing in your ear. Debut author Bryan Washington is already a master storyteller, and this is just one of the many truths Lot shares with us.

In the city of Houston—a sprawling, diverse microcosm of America—the son of a black mother and a Latino father is coming of age. He's working at his family's restaurant, weathering his brother's blows, resenting his older sister's absence. And discovering he likes boys.

Around him, others live and thrive and die in Houston's myriad neighborhoods: a young woman whose affair detonates across an apartment complex, a ragtag baseball team, a group of young hustlers, hurricane survivors, a local drug dealer who takes a Guatemalan teen under his wing, a reluctant chupacabra.

Bryan Washington's brilliant, viscerally drawn world vibrates with energy, wit, and the infinite longing of people searching for home.