A New York Times Book Review Notable Book Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
Longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction "An addictive sprawling epic I wolfed it down."
-Miranda July author of The First Bad Man and It Chooses You "Easily the funniest book I've
read this year." -GQ A portrait of the artist as a young woman. A novel about not just
discovering but inventing oneself. The year is 1995 and email is new. Selin the daughter of
Turkish immigrants arrives for her freshman year at Harvard. 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 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. At 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. On the way she spends two weeks
visiting Paris with Svetlana. 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. 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. With superlative emotional and intellectual
sensitivity mordant wit and pitch-perfect style Batuman dramatizes the uncertainty of life
on the cusp of adulthood. Her prose is a rare and inimitable combination of tenderness and
wisdom its logic as natural and inscrutable as that of memory itself. 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. 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. Named one the best books of the year by Refinery29 • Mashable One • Elle Magazine •
The New York Times • Bookpage • Vogue • NPR • Buzzfeed •The Millions
