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Minor Black Figures
  • Published: 19 March 2026
  • ISBN: 9781529974539
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 400

Minor Black Figures

  • Brandon Taylor
Formats & editions
Tr. Paperback
14 Oct 2025
EBook
19 Mar 2026
Hardback
19 Apr 2026
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Over a hot summer in New York a painter falls for a priest, in this captivating modern love story from the Booker-Prize shortlisted Brandon Taylor

Over a hot summer in New York a painter falls for a priest, in this captivating modern love story from the Booker-Prize shortlisted Brandon Taylor

‘One of the most accomplished, important novelists of his generation’ Guardian

'A piercing, precise, and affecting tale of young love and high art' Kirkus

Wyeth is a newcomer to New York, a young Black painter who is trying to find his place in the contemporary Manhattan art scene. He shares a studio with his friends and earns money working for a gallery and an art restorer but he’s struggling with his portrait painting, unable to truly capture the life of his subjects.

Then he meets Keating, a white former priest struggling with his faith. The two men seemingly have nothing in common, and yet Keating shows Wyeth how to see the world anew. The hot summer progresses, filled with art openings, walks around the city, and Wyeth’s search for a long-forgotten Black artist. But as the men grow closer, the differences between them become more stark, until Wyeth and Keating must decide what they are willing to risk – for art and for love.

A page-turning New York novel and a sweeping modern romance, Minor Black Figures is an involving and tender portrait of loneliness and connection.

'Brandon Taylor is without a doubt our laureate of hyper-intelligent yearning - nobody does it better' Lit Hub

Praise for Brandon Taylor:

‘Taylor has both a classic sensibility, expansive and elegant, and a razor-sharp ability to speak to the contemporary moment’ Emma Cline

'A writer of rare daring, his fiction a series of revelations' Katie Kitamura

'‘The moment-to-moment pleasures of Taylor's prose are such that you simultaneously cannot wait to see where he takes you next while being happy for him to take you anywhere’ Colin Barrett
  • Published: 19 March 2026
  • ISBN: 9781529974539
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 400
Categories:

Praise for Minor Black Figures

Brandon Taylor is without a doubt our laureate of hyper-intelligent yearning - nobody does it better

Lit Hub

Contemplative and sensuous… Taylor is onto something rich and appealing—a story unafraid to foreground love and lust, and that treats emotional ambiguity as a starting point, not as the fuzzy ending common in literary fiction. A piercing, precise, and affecting tale of young love and high art

Kirkus

Minor Black Figures is brilliant — an exploration of the fraught channel between faith and artmaking

Raven Leilani

Dazzling. . . a poetic meditation on Black art, friendship, young love and intimacy

USA Today

A sharp, resonant novel about a young Black gay painter adrift in New York who spends one life-changing summer grappling with questions of faith, desire, and creative purpose

Bustle

Brandon Taylor is always a must-read, and his newest, Minor Black Figures, is another masterpiece… It’s a moving, thoughtful take on friendship, love, and art

Town & Country

Mesmerizingly detailed. . .this novel of ideas about art, selfhood, and faith is also a romance, a friendship story, and an enjoyable slice of one hazy Manhattan summer

Booklist

Sexy as hell... Paced to the languid, sticky rhythms of a New York summer... Minor Black Figures is Taylor’s most accomplished novel — a sustained, idiosyncratic portrait of an artist... imbued with a fresh, tentative sweetness, and anchored by a genuinely swoony summer romance

New York Times
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