What Belongs to You

An American teacher in Sofia, Bulgaria, goes down a stairwell beneath the National Palace of Culture on a warm autumn day. He is looking for sex. In a public bathroom he meets Mitko, a charismatic young hustler.

He goes back to Mitko again and again over the following months. Their meetings grow more intimate and more unnerving, and the teacher finds that the puzzle of Mitko cannot be separated from the puzzle of Bulgaria, a country with a difficult past and an uncertain future.

This is a literary novel of erotic obsession, told around an American expatriate living in a foreign culture. The teacher carries his own complicated inheritance with him, and he is pulled between longing and resentment. He cannot tell desire from danger.

The tone is intense and charged with unease. The book keeps close to one man's attachment to someone he cannot fully understand, and to the distance that remains between them however near they get.