The Slip

A NATIONAL BESTSELLER IN AMERICA

WINNER OF THE 2025 KIRKUS PRIZE FOR FICTION

SHORTLISTED FOR THE NBCC JOHN LEONARD PRIZE

LONGLISTED FOR THE JAMES PATTERSON PRIZE in collaboration with Bookshop.org

Chosen as a BOOK OF THE YEAR in the Washington Post and New York Times Book Review

In the summer of 1998, a pudgy, pasty teenager called Nathaniel Rothstein walks into Terry Tucker’s Boxing Gym in Austin, Texas. For weeks he comes back almost every day, working out obsessively, transforming himself into something new. Then one night at the height of summer, he disappears without a trace.

The Slip follows the extraordinary fallout of that night across twenty years – the dominoes toppling around a dizzying cast of characters – as Nathaniel’s disappearance saves some lives and ruins others. Majestic and far-reaching, it is a gripping literary mystery about racial tensions in modern America, about immigrants and police officers and ordinary citizens, about queerness and belonging, money and gentrification, coming of age and growing old.

Above all it is a novel of the immortal American dream, 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.

© Lucas Schaefer 2026 (P) Penguin Audio 2026