The Idiot: SHORTLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION

Description

The ingenious, hilarious new novel from award-winning writer Elif Batuman - 'It's a novel about being young and stupid that's both wise and clever - and it's a treat' Evening Standard 'I loved it and could have read a thousand more pages of it' Emma Cline, author of The Girls **SHORTLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2018** Selin, a tall, highly strung Turkish-American from New Jersey turns up at Harvard with no idea what to expect. What she doesn't expect is- - How much time she will spend thinking about language and its limitations - An opinionated cosmopolitan Serb named Svetlana, who will become her confidante - A mathematician from Hungary called Ivan, whom she will obsess over when she is supposed to be studying - Feeling dangerously overwhelmed by the challenges and possibilities of adulthood But most of all, Selin does not expect to embark on a study of precisely how baffling love can be when you are trying to forge a self... _______________- PRAISE FOR THE IDIOT- 'A moving, continent-hopping coming-of-age story' Observer 'Elif Batuman surely has one of the best senses of humour...refreshing and unique' Sheila Heti 'Full of zingy one-liners' Financial Times 'Hilarious, brilliant observations about writing, life and crushes' Curtis Sittenfeld 'Delightful and slyly funny' Red

ELIF BATUMAN's first novel, The Idiot, was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize and was shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction. She is also the author of The Possessed- Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, which was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism. She has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2010 and holds a PhD in comparative literature from Stanford University.

I loved it and could have read a thousand more pages of it. It presented this almost moment-by-moment experience of life, in a way that I just felt Batuman had so much control. There's so much wit and pleasure in her writing you feel very comfortable being in the world she's created. -- Emma Cline, author of THE GIRLS Elif Batuman is a writer whose byline creates a flutter of anticipation... If a dominant mode of her generation is knowing introspection, she writes with a bewildered outrospection that delights in the bathetic and the absurd... It's a novel about being young and stupid that's both wise and clever - and it's a treat. * Evening Standard * Elif Batuman surely has one of the best senses of humour in American letters. The pleasure she takes in observing the eccentricities of each of her characters makes for a really refreshing and unique bildungsroman; one more fascinated with what's going on around and outside the bewildered protagonist, than what s going on inside her. -- Sheila Heti, author of HOW SHOULD A PERSON BE? and TICKNOR Each paragraph is a small anthology of well-made observations... Batuman has a rich sense of the details of human attachment and lust. -- Dwight Garner * New York Times * Beautifully written... a wry, funny coming-of-age story set at the dawn of email among a group of Harvard brainiacs too nerdy and self-involved to even think about sex, drugs and drinking. * Daily Mail *