Is Cleanness Worth Reading?
Ada’s Score
Garth Greenwell's Cleanness follows an American teacher living in Sofia, Bulgaria, navigating desire, shame, and intimacy through a series of interlocking encounters. The novel unfolds in luminous, sentence-level prose that owes as much to poetry as to fiction, rendering queer longing with extraordinary precision. Greenwell explores how power, vulnerability, and beauty coexist in relationships that refuse easy categorization. It is a book about the body as a site of both wound and grace.
Spotlight“Greenwell writes sentences you want to read aloud. Aching, precise, and utterly fearless about desire.”
Everything That Aches and Wants
Garth Greenwell writes about desire and shame with a precision so beautiful it almost hurts to read — and Cleanness is his most fully realized meditation on what it means to be a queer body in the world, longing for connection while half-convinced you don't deserve it. Set in Sofia, Bulgaria, the book moves between sensuality and sorrow with the grace of someone who has looked very hard at very difficult things. This is the kind of literature that changes the way you understand yourself.
Ada Brief
AI reading intelligence“Greenwell writes sentences you want to read aloud. Aching, precise, and utterly fearless about desire.”
Everything That Aches and Wants
Garth Greenwell writes about desire and shame with a precision so beautiful it almost hurts to read — and Cleanness is his most fully realized meditation on what it means to be a queer body in the world, longing for connection while half-convinced you don't deserve it. Set in Sofia, Bulgaria, the book moves between sensuality and sorrow with the grace of someone who has looked very hard at very difficult things. This is the kind of literature that changes the way you understand yourself.
Book Details
- Publisher
- Macmillan Audio
- Published
- January 1, 2020
- Pages
- 240
- Language
- English
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Affiliate linksISBN: 9781250785664
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Ada’s Score
4.4
Ada’s editorial score — not an aggregate of reader reviews.
Common Questions About Cleanness
- Is Cleanness worth reading?
- Greenwell writes sentences you want to read aloud. Aching, precise, and utterly fearless about desire. Ada rates it 4.4 out of 5.
- How many pages is Cleanness?
- Cleanness is 240 pages long — around 4–5 hours at an average reading pace.
