The Slip
A Novel
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- 14,99 €
Description de l’éditeur
NATIONAL BESTSELLER | WINNER OF THE KIRKUS PRIZE
One of The New York Times Book Review's 100 Notable Books of 2025
One of The Washington Post's 10 Best Books of 2025
For readers of Jonathan Franzen and Nathan Hill comes a haymaker of an American novel about a missing teenage boy, cases of fluid and mistaken identity, and the transformative power of boxing.
Austin, Texas: It’s the summer of 1998, and there’s a new face on the scene at Terry Tucker’s Boxing Gym. Sixteen-year-old Nathaniel Rothstein has never felt comfortable in his own skin, but under the tutelage of a swaggering, Haitian-born ex-fighter named David Dalice, he begins to come into his own. Even the boy’s slightly stoned uncle, Bob Alexander, who is supposed to be watching him for the summer, notices the change. Nathaniel is happier, more confident—tanner, even. Then one night he vanishes, leaving little trace behind.
Across the city, Charles Rex, now going simply by “X,” has been undergoing a teenage transformation of his own, trolling the phone sex hotline that his mother works, seeking an outlet for everything that feels wrong about his body, looking for intimacy and acceptance in a culture that denies him both. As a surprising and unlikely romance blooms, X feels, for a moment, like he might have found the safety he’s been searching for. But it's never that simple.
More than a decade later, Nathaniel’s uncle Bob receives a shocking tip, propelling him to open his own investigation into his nephew’s disappearance. The resulting search involves gymgoers past and present, including a down-on-his-luck twin and his opportunistic brother; a rookie cop determined to prove herself; and Alexis Cepeda, a promising lightweight, who crossed the US-Mexico border when he was only fourteen, carrying with him a license bearing the wrong name and face.
Bobbing and weaving across the ever-shifting canvas of a changing country, The Slip is an audacious, daring look at sex and race in America that builds to an unforgettable collision in the center of the ring.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Schaefer debuts with a rollicking tale of transformation revolving around a boxing gym in Austin, Tex. Nathaniel Rothstein, 16, is sent from his hometown in Newton, Mass., to spend the summer of 1998 with his uncle Bob in Austin. Bob sets him up with a job at a local nursing facility alongside David, a Haitian immigrant and fellow member of Bob's boxing gym. David, who is Black and aware that white boys such as Nathaniel lap up everything he says, regales him with tales of his sexual conquests. The stories fill Nathaniel with desire, and he pretends to be Black to a phone sex hotline operator he knows as Sasha. As the end of summer nears, Nathaniel resolves to meet Sasha, who turns out to be linked to his disappearance. Nathaniel is still missing in 2014, when Bob and a hapless cop, another of the gym's patrons, try to solve the mystery after a new lead comes to light. The circuitous route to its resolution includes colorful if exhausting detours into the lives of side characters, including a small-town beauty queen turned nude model turned hairdresser, a border-hopping clown, an undocumented up-and-coming boxer, and a quick-witted, elderly Italian American woman. This one-of-a-kind tale delights and exasperates, often on the same page.
