Books from United States — The Book Roads

Elif Batuman

It’s 1995, email is new, and Harvard freshman Selin Karadağ is trying to figure out how language, love, and life actually work. The daughter of Turkish immigrants, she befriends a charismatic Serbian classmate and begins exchanging increasingly mysterious emails with Ivan, an older Hungarian mathematics student. When their ambiguous relationship follows her from university to the Hungarian countryside, Selin finds herself navigating first love, cultural misunderstandings, and the bewildering transition to adulthood. Witty, intellectually curious, and quietly moving, The Idiot captures the awkward beauty of becoming yourself when you have no idea who that person might be. A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, it is a coming-of-age story for readers who think too much and feel more than they can explain.

2017