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 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.