Minor Black Figures

Brandon Taylor

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JONATHAN CAPE
14 October 2025

Fiction & Literature; Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945); Adult & contemporary romance; Fiction: special features

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

By: Brandon Taylor
Imprint: JONATHAN CAPE
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 234mm, Width: 153mm, Spine: 30mm
Weight: 486g
ISBN: 9781787336438
ISBN 10: 1787336433
Pages: 400
Publication Date: 14 October 2025
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming

Brandon Taylor is the author of the novels The Late Americans and Real Life, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, and named a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice and a Science + Literature Selected Title by the National Book Foundation. His collection Filthy Animals, a US bestseller, was awarded the Story Prize and shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize. He is the 2022-2023 Mary Ellen von der Heyden Fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. He tweets at @blgtylr, where he has 90k followers, and his newsletter can be found at- blgtylr.substack.com.

Reviews 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 *