Yet a certain amount of concealment adds to the novel’s rhetorical power. “I’ve never been good at concealing anything, the whole bent of my nature is toward confession,” he tells us. Yet part of the novel’s knottiness lies in the way that, in post-communist Europe, the narrator’s identity as an American might trump everything else about him. That virtuoso unbroken paragraph shows how his Republican-voting father dug himself out of a violent childhood in the south by paying his way through law school, “purchasing my life”, as the narrator thinks, with a bitterness perceptible only in retrospect: the American dream – or at least his father’s version of it – couldn’t accommodate a gay son. News that his estranged father is terminally ill occasions a 40-page paragraph of nested anguish from his Kentucky youth, adding psychological depth and at times breathtaking drama. But we can only gain limited insight into the troubles that led the narrator to pursue a new life far from home. Mitko has cuts and bruises and complains of liver trouble, attributing his circumstances to fate. Mitko emerges as a haunting silhouette, with the narrator’s vaguely patronising hunch that he’s free from “self-gnawing, from any squeamishness about existence” discomfitingly unprovable. Mitko wafts in and out of a story that unfolds over three years, described from the narrator’s perspective in unhurried long sentences. He often asks for cash and hints he’d like a smartphone the narrator feels that operating in a second language leaves him playing catch-up. When the narrator starts paying him for home visits, Mitko is available but disengaged, openly using the narrator’s laptop to plan his week with other clients. A public toilet in Sofia is where the narrator’s obsession with Mitko begins – a 23-year-old former builder selling his body after losing his job and home in the financial crash.

What Belongs to You – the title is lifted from Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, an ur-text of homoerotic infatuation – is chiefly a narrative of thought and feeling: its elements are combustible but the true conflagration lies in the story’s prehistory. You sense that the book itself (produced after a spell at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop that postdates Greenwell’s period in Bulgaria) is the story’s happy ending, which is part of what makes it troubling. Later – any readerly sophistication in tatters – I found myself wondering what Greenwell might have left out from his own experience in order to maintain the novel’s insistent melancholy. The book's elements are combustible but the true conflagration lies in the story's prehistory

What Belongs to You by Garth Greenwell