The Vast Fields of Ordinary

Nick Burd's first novel, The Vast Fields of Ordinary, was published in 2009. It covers a single summer, the one after its narrator finishes high school, and it is told in the first person by a suburban teenager who has not yet told anyone he is gay.

The cast around him is small and sharply drawn. There is his new best friend, who is openly lesbian; there is a football star he is drawn to; and there is a drug dealer he also becomes involved with, and the novel moves between those two attachments as the summer goes on and the narrator works out what he actually wants.

The book won the American Library Association's Stonewall Book Award in the children's and young adult literature category, and it was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. Booklist put it on its Rainbow List for 2010, a bibliography of young adult books with significant gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender or questioning content, and it has been discussed ever since as one of the titles that widened what a young adult novel about a gay teenager could be.