Wallace is a scholarship student from a poor family pursuing postgraduate studies in science at a university in the Midwest. He also happens to be gay and black.

It is not so much his sexuality or background that threatens to disturb his idyllic student life. Instead, he finds himself increasingly angry and torn after coming up against racism one too many times.

Over a long weekend at the tailend of summer, Wallace, the only black person in his circle, grows in intimacy with another male student, Miller, and suffers an injustice that makes him contemplate his future.

This incisive debut novel by black American writer Brandon Taylor, who dropped out of a biochemistry programme to take up writing, takes a withering look at insidious racism in higher education. It is one of six books shortlisted for this year's Booker Prize.

Like Wallace, Taylor was raised in Alabama in the southern part of the United States and furthered his studies in the Midwest. He was an Iowa Arts Fellow at the Iowa Writers' Workshop in fiction.

He gets under the skin of Wallace, who still feels the pain of childhood abuse and finds himself facing cruelty once more in the elite white environment which he has worked very hard to be part of.

At a dinner, a student named Roman tells Wallace it is "ungrateful" for him to consider quitting as the school had "brought you in knowing what your deficiencies were".

Wallace thinks about the expertise he has worked hard to acquire, but what Roman is referring to "is instead a deficiency of whiteness, a lack of some requisite sameness".

Taylor skewers the complicity of Wallace's friends. Nobody at the dinner speaks up for him. One of them laughs nervously.

"They are always laughing. This is it, Wallace thinks. That's how they get by. Silence and laughter, silence and laughter, switch and swing. The way one glides through this life without having to think about anything hard."

The irony stings when a student accuses Wallace of being a misogynist when she herself hurls racist and homophobic insults at him.

Wallace feels increasingly alienated but fears "real life" outside campus, where his prospects are bleak and people are, to him, "bloated and commercial and with so little desire in life except to see the next day". But the racism that lies behind ivory towers remains very real too.

The novel strikes a note of hope with its tender depiction of Wallace's relationship with Miller, who opens up to Wallace.

Deeply compelling and existential, Real Life attempts to get to the heart of how people struggle to connect and the many ways in which they inflict hurt on others.

If you like this, read: Sally Rooney's Conversations With Friends (Faber & Faber, 2018, $19.26, available at bit.ly/Conv WFriends_SRooney). Irish writer Sally Rooney's debut novel, about the entanglement between former lovers Bobbi and Frances and married couple Melissa and Nick, is an engrossing read that offers sharp observations on how people hurt one another.