The Town of Babylon

The Town of Babylon is epic, intimate, hilarious, and heartrending: an unqualified achievement of the highest degree. Alejandro Varela captures suburbia's gridlocked travails alongside the infinitude of the heart, excavating and illuminating questions of home, family, debt, and happiness. It's as much of a love story as a story about love in the world, broaching the impossible question of whether we can ever really go home again—but Varela clears it with ease. This book is a queer masterpiece and Varela's prose is masterful. I didn't want it to end.
—Bryan Washington, award-winning author of Memorial and Lot

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About

A debut novel about suburban decline, following Andrés, a public health professor who returns to his hometown and confronts a past he thought he’d left behind long ago.

When his father falls ill, Andrés goes back home to tend to his recovery. Reevaluating his rocky marriage in the wake of his husband’s infidelity and with little else to do, Andrés decides to attend his twenty-year high school reunion, where he runs into the long-lost characters of his youth.

Jeremy, his first love, is now married with two children after having been incarcerated and recovering from addiction. Paul, who Andrés has long suspected of having killed a man in a homophobic attack, is now an Evangelical minister and father of five. And Simone, Andrés’s best friend, is in a psychiatric institution following a diagnosis of schizophrenia. During this short stay, Andrés confronts these relationships, the death of his brother, and the many sacrifices his parents made to offer him a better life.

A novel about the essential nature of community in maintaining one’s own health, The Town of Babylon is an intimate portrait of queer, racial, and class identity, a call to reevaluate the ties of societal bonds and the systems in which they are forged.

Praise

Varela’s debut novel shimmers with tension, navigating the personal and political with practiced ease. Treading the waters of adolescence and adulthood, The Town of Babylon navigates the complexities of home, queerness, and messy histories with measure and empathy. Weaving together histories of immigration, economic unease, and the health complications of racism in America, Varela troubles ideas of community and shared experience amidst a polarizing landscape.

—Kaitlynn Cassady, Seminary Co-op Bookstores

Alejandro Varela's debut dazzles, astonishes, and grabs hold of your heart through the very last page. Heartbreak and secrets abound in this intense, astute meditation on race, family, class, love and friendship. Varela's wry humor is the icing on the cake of this brilliant novel.

—Deesha Philyaw, author of The Secret Lives of Church Ladies*

In Alejandro Varela’s assured debut, a man’s reluctant return to his hometown reveals that the past is not as distant as we sometimes tell ourselves it is. The Town of Babylon is funny and sexy as well as thoughtful, even heartbreaking. It’s an incisive taxonomy of the American suburb, looking beyond the white picket fence to tell a different story—what it is to be queer, the child of immigrants, and a person of color in this country.

—Rumaan Alam, author of Leave the World Behind*

Alejandro Varela's The Town of Babylon takes the tedium and heartbreak of life and renders it in extraordinary ways. I am astonished by the way Varela captures that difficult liminality: where love, under certain circumstances, slights as much as it heals. He gets to the core of all the human pressures of living in a country where everything—everything—has a price. The Town of Babylon is haunting, sublime, solemn, and true.

—Robert Jones, Jr., author of The Prophets*

A thoughtful deep dive into a gay Latino man’s return to his working-class town, where his alienation lies in wait. Alejandro Varela’s promising debut is filled with insight about the past that produced our wounds, and how, despite having answers to lifelong questions, it holds no redemption. Intimate and jarring.

—Sarah Schulman, author of After Delores

Alejandro Varela dissects the disease of suburban life in The Town of Babylon, a finely-crafted literary scalpel with two edges, one that cuts through the layers of a dying body politic and another that clears arteries blocking the way to the heart of personal and political health: community.

—Roberto Lovato, author of Unforgetting

The Town of Babylon marks the debut of a major talent. Alejandro Varela puts a new twist on the American contemporary novel dealing with immigration, identity, race and gender. His scope is wide, encompassing, and his vision of the “Melting Pot” includes a generous portion of the different new kinds of Americans that make up the the United States in the Trumpian age. The Town of Babylon made me think about pertinent questions that much contemporary fiction is too timid to delve into in a compassionate, piercing and unsentimental way. Varela’s marvelous achievement reminds me of the world John Updike created in Rabbit Run and also of the deeply troubled America Philip Roth gave us in American Pastoral.

—Jaime Manrique, author of Latin Moon in Manhattan

* National Book Award finalist

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Published by Astra House
Mar 22, 2022 | 320 Pages
ISBN 9781662601033