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The Slip

byLucas Schaefer

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In downtown Austin in the summer of 1998, a scrawny, pasty, unpopular teenager called Nathaniel Rothstein walks into Terry Tucker’s Boxing Gym. For weeks he comes back almost every day, working out obsessively, transforming himself. Then one night at the height of summer, he disappears. Nathaniel Rothstein is never seen again.

The Slip follows the extraordinary, unpredictable fallout of this mystery across twenty years – as Nathaniel’s disappearance saves some lives and ruins others. The Slip is a majestic, far-reaching novel of the immortal American dream, drawing together a dizzying cast of characters and grappling with all the ways, good and bad, chosen and forced, that a person can slip out of their own story – and into someone else’s.

Franzen/Roth/Irving comparisons are earned and deserved... Not since Nathan Hill’s The Nix have we seen a debut as hugely ambitious as this one

Kirkus

About Lucas Schaefer

Lucas Schaefer lives in Austin, Texas. His first novel, The Slip, was published in the US in June 2025 and went on to become a national bestseller and to win the Kirkus Prize for Fiction. It was also shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize and was selected as a book of the year by the Washington Post and the New York Times Book Review. Lucas’s writing has appeared in the Paris Review, One Story, Baffler and other publications.
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Details
  • Imprint: Penguin
  • ISBN: 9781405998178
  • Length: 496 pages
  • Price: £5.99
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