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Minor Black Figures

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What to expect

Brought to you by Penguin.

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

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.

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

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

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

© Brandon Taylor 2026 (P) Penguin Audio 2026

Critics Review

Minor Black Figures is brilliant — an exploration of the fraught channel between faith and artmaking
Raven Leilani
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
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
[A] stunning…novel… Taylor writes magnificently about art ?in a ?Künstlerroman that doubles as an inquiry into desire, faith and what it costs to create beauty in a world that would rather not see you
Observer, *Books to Look Out For 2026*

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