Take Me With You
He saved a plant of mine before he knew my name.
"A love story that understands how distance is measured not just in miles, but in years... Liam and Camilo's connection is unforgettable." -Chicago Book Review
THREE 5-STAR REVIEWS FROM READERS' FAVORITE
"The author delivers a masterclass in pacing." -Readers' Favorite
"Its first-person voice turns ordinary details... into vivid portraits of longing and attraction." -Readers' Favorite
"Readers drawn to the elegance of Vuong's intimate handling of memory in On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous will appreciate this approach." -Readers' Favorite
A love story between two men, an American server who has never asked anyone for anything and an undocumented Colombian who cannot promise to stay, set between Chicago and Sacramento across nine years: an aching gay literary novel of desire and distance from the author of Remember Me, for readers of Bryan Washington, Colm T ib n, and Philippe Besson.
When Liam Byrne, who waits tables at a breakfast restaurant at O'Hare, posts a photograph of a dying plant, a stranger in Colombia tells him how to save it, and keeps writing. The advice becomes a voice on his phone every morning, eleven months of it, then a plane to Sacramento. Camilo is twenty-five, the son of a woman who cut roses for export in the greenhouses of Rionegro, newly arrived with a backpack and no papers, and exactly the man Liam has been listening to. Two weekends, a rented Mustang, the Pacific, which Camilo has never seen, a nine-dollar pack of socks, and neither man is in any doubt about what they have. But Camilo cannot stay in the country, and nothing Liam has is the thing that would let him.
In a car outside a cemetery in December, Camilo asks the question Liam cannot answer: why, in a whole year, Liam has never once asked him to come to Chicago. A man who does not ask cannot be told no. Liam has gone his whole life on that arrangement, and it has cost him more than he knows. It is about to cost him Camilo.
For nine years, Liam builds a life the way he has built everything, without asking for it: a section of a restaurant floor at four in the morning, four hundred voice notes in Spanish he cannot stop playing, and Owen, a fellow server who sees everything Liam cannot say. Then Camilo comes back. He has a life of his own in Sacramento, and he has to be back in it by Tuesday. Liam has his in Chicago. Love, after nine years, is no longer the only question. Liam will have to ask, and a man who asks can be told no.
Take Me With You is a portrait of a working life, of everything papers decide, and of the one sentence a man can go a lifetime without saying.
Customer Reviews
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