Call Me By Your Name

“This novel is hot. A coming-of-age story, a coming-out story, a Proustian meditation on time and desire, a love letter, an invocation and something of an epitaph, Call Me by Your Name is also an open question.” - Stacey D’Erasmo, The New York TimesIt’s the mid-1980s; the place is the Italian Riviera. Elio – 17 years old, precocious, the son of an academic – finds himself falling for the older Oliver, a postdoctoral scholar completing his manuscript on Heraclitus at the beautiful home of Elio’s family. Oliver is worldly, handsome, a seductive contrast to Elio’s own naivety. Both are bright and questioning; the hook of desire is soon caught fast.André Aciman – who so mesmerised with his autobiographical account of family and childhood in Out of Egypt – delivers a pitch-perfect elegy to a perfect lost summer and its long, slow shadow. Elegant, sensual, brimming with astute observation and recollection, Call Me By Your Name is the contemporary classic of love, identity, fate and memory."If this is agony for the reader, it is because it is so familiar. Just beyond that crepuscular Mediterranean sky is the memory of our own first love. As with Proust, Aciman's story is a porous text through which we cannot help but recall scenes from our own lives." - Kathryn Crim, The Threepenny Review