Great novelists do not always make great writers of memoirs, but André Aciman is a brilliant master of both. Call Me by Your Name may be his best-known novel, but his five subsequent novels have only fortified his reputation. (Eight White Nights, which takes place on New York’s Upper West Side, is a particular favorite.) Out of Egypt was his first memoir, and, as Michiko Kakutani wrote in The New York Times, the book has scenes “as strange and marvelous as something in García Márquez, as comical and surprising as something in Chekhov.”
Aciman has now followed that 1994 best-seller with Roman Year, his tale of living in Italy as a teenager after leaving Egypt and before moving to New York. It is Aciman at his most moving and poetic, capturing the ache and yearning of what it is like to be on the cusp of adulthood.
