Named one the best books of the year by Refinery29, Mashable One, Elle Magazine, The New York Times, Bookpage, Vogue, NPR, Buzzfeed, and The Millions. Batuman's fiction is unguarded against both life's affronts and its beauty - and has at its command the complete range of thinking and feeling which they entail. The Idiot is a heroic yet self-effacing reckoning with the terror and joy of becoming a person in a world that is as intoxicating as it is disquieting.

Her prose is a rare and inimitable combination of tenderness and wisdom its logic as natural and inscrutable as that of memory itself. With superlative emotional and intellectual sensitivity, mordant wit, and pitch-perfect style, Batuman dramatizes the uncertainty of life on the cusp of adulthood. For Selin, this is a journey further inside herself: A coming to grips with the ineffable and exhilarating confusion of first love, and with the growing consciousness that she is doomed to become a writer. Selin's summer in Europe does not resonate with anything she has previously heard about the typical experiences of American college students, or indeed of any other kinds of people. On the way, she spends two weeks visiting Paris with Svetlana. Selin may have barely spoken to Ivan, but with each email they exchange, the act of writing seems to take on new and increasingly mysterious meanings.Īt the end of the school year, Ivan goes to Budapest for the summer, and Selin heads to the Hungarian countryside, to teach English in a program run by one of Ivan's friends. She signs up for classes in subjects she has never heard of, befriends her charismatic and worldly Serbian classmate, Svetlana, and, almost by accident, begins corresponding with Ivan, an older mathematics student from Hungary.

Selin, the daughter of Turkish immigrants, arrives for her freshman year at Harvard.

A novel about not just discovering but inventing oneself. Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for FictionĪ portrait of the artist as a young woman.

The idiot by elif batuman