The Idiot

A remarkable book from the New York Times Book Review in 2017. "An addictive, sprawling epic; I devoured it." - Miranda July, author of The First Bad Man and It Chooses You. "Definitely the funniest book I've read this year." - GQ.

A portrait of the artist as a young woman. A novel about discovering and inventing oneself. The year is 1995, and email is new. Selin, the daughter of Turkish immigrants, begins her first year at Harvard University. She enrolls in courses in subjects she has never heard of, befriends her charismatic and open-minded Serbian classmate Svetlana, and almost by chance starts corresponding with Ivan, an older mathematics student from Hungary. Selin may have hardly 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 is left behind.