Lucas Schaefer’s ambitious debut, “The Slip,” is a crime novel in the same way it is a boxing novel, a coming-of-age story, a black comedy, and a Greek tragedy. The winner of the 2025 Kirkus Prize for Fiction, it centers on a missing teenager within a densely populated plot that bobs, weaves, and levitates around a boxing gym in Austin, Texas, from 1998 to 2014.

Perhaps not since Nathan Hill’s “The Nix” (2016) have we seen a first novel of such sprawling scope, one that pulls out all the stops to tell a unique version of an American story. At its heart is 16-year-old Nathaniel Rothstein, a miserable teenager from Newton, Massachusetts, sent to live with his uncle in Austin for the summer of 1998. His uncle, Bob Alexander, is a history professor at the University of Texas.

That year, Austin itself was in transition — shifting from a somnolent college town into a pricey, high-tech metropolis. Schaefer skillfully examines this drama of change, paralleling the transformation of a city and a culture with that of an adolescent. It was a moment when the internet was beginning to alter daily life and discussions of gender identity were entering the mainstream.

To give his nephew structure, Bob finds him a volunteer job at a rehab center with a friend from Terry Tucker’s Boxing Gym: David Dalice, a charismatic Haitian immigrant. David becomes Nathaniel’s mentor, offering unconventional worldly advice. Nathaniel, in turn, channels this inspiration into an obsession with “Sasha,” the voice on a 1-900 phone sex hotline. Then, one day in August, he goes out and never returns.

While Nathaniel is absent for most of the narrative, his disappearance binds a vast ensemble of striking characters. More than a decade later, an anonymous clue mailed to Uncle Bob reopens the case.

In the search for answers, we meet a rookie female cop; a Playboy-model-turned-beautician and her unhappily gendered teenage son (who has just changed his name from Charles Rex to “X”); various denizens of the boxing gym, including a homeless man allowed to bunk there and his twin, literally an evil clown; and a depressed woman in rehab rediscovering her Italian American identity.

This vibrant cross-section of humanity is jumbled across nearly 500 pages of arresting prose. “The Slip” is a novel of immense ambition, a kinetic and poignant exploration of loss, identity, and the people orbiting a single, unanswered question.