Town of Babylon, The

In this contemporary debut novel-an intimate portrait of queer, racial, and class identity -Andres, a gay Latinx professor, returns to his suburban hometown in the wake of his husband's infidelity. There he finds himself with no excuse not to attend his twenty-year high school reunion, and hesitantly begins to reconnect with people he used to call friends. Over the next few weeks, while caring for his aging parents and navigating the neighborhood where he grew up, Andres falls into old habits with friends he thought he'd left behind. Before long, he unexpectedly becomes entangled with his first love and is forced to tend to past wounds. Captivating and poignant; a modern coming-of-age story about the essential nature of community, The Town of Babylon is a page-turning novel about young love and a close examination of our social systems and the toll they take when they fail us.

"Unsparing yet big-hearted, The Town of Babylon will delight anyone who's ever dreaded a school reunion-or believed they'd outgrown a community. Varela throws open the closet of queer suburban adolescence with verve, empathy, and insight. A deeply moving debut." -Julian Lucas, staff writer, The New Yorker "In portraying Babylon, the diverse working-class Long Island town where he grew up, Varela paid attention to the heart disease, drug abuse, and dwindling economic opportunities that add up to a kind of communal stress and desperation. But the book, set over a week following a 20th high school reunion, also features sex and longing, love for family and friends, and an overarching wry affection." -Kate Tuttle, The Boston Globe "A richly textured portrait of ordinary queer life." -Book Riot "The Town of Babylon is a grown up and realistic story that thoughtfully depicts the struggle to find out how to deal with the past when all you want is to move forward." -David Vogel, BuzzFeed "The Town of Babylon foregrounds the way social differences play out between white and non-white, non-white and non-white, white and white. Despite what some of the United States population would like to believe, differences of race, gender, class, sexuality, religion cannot be elided, cannot go unseen. Varela's keen attentiveness to the everyday unraveling of such relations indicates his sensitivity to the conditions of life as we know it." -Marcos Gonsalez, Protean Magazine "[Varela's] precise pacing of [the] pivotal moments make for storytelling both riveting and poignant... [the novel's] distinct and intertwining narrative voices justify the rich and pointed cultural critique of the American suburb." -Benedict Nguyen, INTO "A dynamic and resonant debut . . . Hopefully there will be more books to come from the talented Varela." -Bay Area Reporter "Line for vivid line, Alejandro Varela's The Town of Babylon is a deep breath of fresh air, while idea for incisive idea it is a howl of righteous rage. Rage at the suburbs, at the past, at a country whose promises are glibly made and rarely kept, at all the great and small ways we betray each other and ourselves. But it's also a novel about love. Love's power, limits, and impossible persistence in the first and last places we think to look for it. The Town of Babylon is a remarkable debut from a tremendous new voice." -Justin Taylor, author of Riding with the Ghost "In The Town of Babylon, Alejandro Varela, whose educational background is in public health, combines a social scientist's powers of observation and analysis with a master writer's ability to delineate character in rich, absorbing prose. This is a challenging, fascinating portrait of contemporary America." -John Clum, New York Journal of Books "New York-based Latino writer Alejandro Varela weaves together histories of immigration, ec

Alejandro Varela (he/him) is based in New York. His work has appeared in The Point magazine, Boston Review, Harper's Magazine, The Rumpus, Joyland Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, The Offing, Blunderbuss Magazine, Pariahs (an anthology, SFA Press, 2016), the Southampton Review, and The New Republic. He is a 2019 Jerome Fellow in Literature and his graduate studies were in public health. His first novel, The Town of Babylon, was published by Astra House in 2022.