The Book of Lost Friends
Lisa Wingate, 2020
Random House
400 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781984819888
Summary
A family amid the destruction of the post–Civil War South, and of a modern-day teacher who learns of their story and its vital connection to her students’ lives.
Bestselling author Lisa Wingate brings to life startling stories from actual "Lost Friends" advertisements that appeared in Southern newspapers after the Civil War, as newly freed slaves desperately searched for loved ones who had been sold away.
Louisiana, 1875:
In the tumultuous era of Reconstruction, three young women set off as unwilling companions on a perilous quest: Hannie, a freed slave; Lavinia, the pampered heir to a now destitute plantation; and Juneau Jane, Lavinia’s Creole half sister.
Each carries private wounds and powerful secrets as they head for Texas, following roads rife with vigilantes and soldiers still fighting a war lost a decade before.
For Lavinia and Juneau Jane, the journey is one of stolen inheritance and financial desperation, but for Hannie, torn from her mother and siblings before slavery’s end, the pilgrimage west reignites an agonizing question: Could her long-lost family still be out there? Beyond the swamps lie the limitless frontiers of Texas and, improbably, hope.
Louisiana, 1987:
For first-year teacher Benedetta Silva, a subsidized job at a poor rural school seems like the ticket to canceling her hefty student debt—until she lands in a tiny, out-of-step Mississippi River town.
Augustine, Louisiana, is suspicious of new ideas and new people, and Benny can scarcely comprehend the lives of her poverty-stricken students.
But amid the gnarled live oaks and run-down plantation homes lie the century-old history of three young women, a long-ago journey, and a hidden book that could change everything. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1964-65
• Where—Germany
• Raised—Tulsa, Oklahoma, USA
• Education—B.A./B.S., Oklahoma State University
• Awards—(see below)
• Currently—lives in Menro, Arkansas
Lisa Wingate is an American inspirational speaker and the author of more than 20 novels, many of them bestsellers. Wingate was born in Germany but raised in the U.S. state of Oklahoma where she attended Oklahoma State University, earning her Bachelor's degree in English and communications.
She married her husband, Sam, a science teacher and rancher from Texas, in 1988. They lived with their two sons in various towns in central Texas, eventually settling in Menro, Arkansas—in the Ouachita Mountains of southwest Arkansas, not far from the Texas border.
Wingate said she has always been writing, even as a child. As a first-grader, while her classmates played their way through recess, Wingate stayed at her desk creating stories. Her teacher Mrs. Krackhardt noticed her writing and ended up reading the stories to Wingate's classmates. On Wingate's final report card, her teacher wrote, "Keep that pencil working with that wonderful imagination, Lisa!
As Wingate told the Community Advocate, the hometown paper in Massachusetts where that elementary school is still located:
I went from being a shy transfer kid with no friends to a wonderful writer. I felt that writing was something special, and I was something special.… Even though we moved again and left that school behind, I always thought of myself as a writer because Mrs. Krackhardt told me I was.
Years later, in 2001, after publishing her first book, Tending Roses, Wingate tried to locate her teacher…but without success. It wasn't until 2012, when she published The Language of Sycamores Tree—and wanted to dedicate the book to her—that a local bookstore owner recognized Mrs. Krackhardt and told her about Wingate.
Wingate is one of the few authors who has been able to make the cross over between the Christian and mainstream markets. She publishes works with Bethany House and Penguin Random House. Not only do her works generate large sales, they have also won or been nominated for awards—the Pat Conroy Southern Book Prize, the Oklahoma Book Award, the Utah Library Award, the Carol Award, the Christy Award, and the RT Reviewers’ Choice Award. (Adapted from various online sources. Retrieved 7/18/2017.)
Book Reviews
[D]isappointing…. Though the twists of Hannie’s and Benny’s stories will keep readers guessing, the book is marred by a lack of depth, and Hannie’s reliance on and trust in her former owner is frustratingly unquestioned.
Publishers Weekly
[E]nthralling and ultimately heartening…. Though it can take a moment to catch on, the two intertwined narratives eventually speak back and forth… [e]mphasizing… that stories matter and should never go untold…. [An] absorbing historical for many readers.
Library Journal
Wingate makes history come alive with the dual tale of formerly enslaved Hannie Gossett in 1875 and Benedetta "Benny" Silva in 1987.… Historical fiction fans will appreciate the authentic articles and the connection between modern times and the past
Booklist
Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, use our LitLovers Book Club Resources. They can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
(Resources by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online and off, with attribution. Thanks.)
Three Daughters of Eve
Elif Shafak, 2017
Bloomsbury USA
384 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781632869951
Summary
The stunning, timely new novel from the acclaimed, internationally bestselling author of The Architect's Apprentice and The Bastard of Istanbul.
Peri, a married, wealthy, beautiful Turkish woman, is on her way to a dinner party at a seaside mansion in Istanbul when a beggar snatches her handbag.
As she wrestles to get it back, a photograph falls to the ground — an old polaroid of three young women and their university professor. A relic from a past — and a love — Peri had tried desperately to forget.
Three Daughters of Eve is set over an evening in contemporary Istanbul, as Peri arrives at the party and navigates the tensions that simmer in this crossroads country between East and West, religious and secular, rich and poor. Over the course of the dinner, and amidst an opulence that is surely ill-begotten, terrorist attacks occur across the city.
Competing in Peri's mind however are the memories invoked by her almost-lost polaroid, of the time years earlier when she was sent abroad for the first time, to attend Oxford University. As a young woman there, she had become friends with the charming, adventurous Shirin, a fully assimilated Iranian girl, and Mona, a devout Egyptian-American.
Their arguments about Islam and feminism find focus in the charismatic but controversial Professor Azur, who teaches divinity, but in unorthodox ways. As the terrorist attacks come ever closer, Peri is moved to recall the scandal that tore them all apart.
Elif Shafak is the number one bestselling novelist in her native Turkey, and her work is translated and celebrated around the world. In Three Daughters of Eve, she has given us a rich and moving story that humanizes and personalizes one of the most profound sea changes of the modern world. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—October 25, 1970
• Where—Strasbourg, France
• Education—M.A., Ph.D., Middle East Technical University
• Awards—(see below)
• Currently—lives in London, England, UK
Elif Shafak, a Turkish author, columnist, and professor, is Turkey's most well-known female novelist.
Writing in both Turkish and English, she has published 15 books, 10 of which are novels, blending Eastern and Western traditions of storytelling on subjects such as women, minorities, immigrants, subcultures, and youth. Her writings reflect her interest in history, philosophy, Sufism, oral culture, and cultural politics.
Şafak was born Elif Bilgin in Strasbourg to philosopher Nuri Bilgin and Şafak Atayman, who later became a diplomat. After her parents' separation, Şafak was raised by her mother.[6] She says not growing up in a typical patriarchal family had a great impact on her work and writing. She incorporated her mother's first name—Turkish for "dawn"—with her own when constructing her pen name.
Cosmopolitan identity
Şafak spent her teenage years in Madrid and Amman before returning to Turkey. She has lived around the world—Boston, Michigan, Arizona, Istanbul and London—and her writing has thrived upon these journeys. She sees herself as not just migrating from country to country, city to city but language to language, even in her native Turkish she believes she plays to the vocabularies of different cultures. Through it all she has maintained a deep attachment to the city of Istanbul, which plays an important part in her fiction. As a result, a sense of multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism has consistently characterized both her life and her work.
In 2010 she was awarded the title of Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. In October 2017 it was announced that Shafak will be the 2017 contributor to the Future Library Project, a collection of 100 literary works commissioned yearly from 2014 to 2114 and kept unread until 2114 when they will be printed as a limited edition anthology. (From .)
Book Reviews
There is a compelling confidence about the scope of Elif Shafak’s work. As a writer who stands between west and east, working in Turkish and English, living in Istanbul and London, she engages with some of the most pressing political and personal themes of our times. Her new novel is no exception.
Natasha Walter - Guardian (UK)
This is a truly modern novel—about the way we are shaped by politics, including freedom of expression and political repression, but also by our personal relationships (Best Books of 2017).
Sadiq Khan - Financial Times
[Shfak's] writing in English is a mixed bag, with passages of appealing sensuality and intelligence alternating with sections that are overwrought or clunky and in need of more rigorous editing. At times the women (and indeed the men) here can seem like mouthpieces for ideological arguments rather than real characters…. Despite all that, Three Daughters of Eve is a compelling read.
Cathy Dillon - Irish Times
Turkey's best-known female novelist, Elif Shafak, has been building a body of work that needles her country's historical amnesia.… The ways in which an unresolved past can fuel present-day tensions is the subject of Shafak's vivid and timely eighth novel.
Vogue
A beautifully rendered tale of homeland and faith.
Marie Claire
Shafak’s ambitious novel follows Peri Nalbantoglu, namely her memories of childhood and a scandal … at Oxford.… [R]readers interested in debates about the nature of God will find the book intriguing.
Publishers Weekly
Shafak uses rich, thought-provoking prose to illuminate women's struggles and fuse Islam with feminist theory.… [She] illustrates the ongoing fissure between Eastern and Western culture in Turkey. —Sally Bissell, formerly with Lee Cty. Lib. Syst., Fort Myers, FL
Library Journal
Shafak is a brilliant chronicler of the ills that plague contemporary society and once again proves her mettle.
Booklist
Shafak's infectious, earnest exuberance is used here to better effect than it has been recently; her portrait of a woman in existential crisis feels universal, shining clarifying light on Islam … within the frame of today's world.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, use our LitLovers Book Club Resources. They can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
(Resources by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online and off, with attribution. Thanks.)
The Beekeeper of Aleppo
Christy Lefteri, 2019
Random House
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781984821218
Summary
This unforgettable novel puts human faces on the Syrian war with the immigrant story of a beekeeper, his wife, and the triumph of spirit when the world becomes unrecognizable.
Nuri is a beekeeper and Afra, his wife, is an artist. Mornings, Nuri rises early to hear the call to prayer before driving to his hives in the countryside.
On weekends, Afra sells her colorful landscape paintings at the open-air market. They live a simple life, rich in family and friends, in the hills of the beautiful Syrian city of Aleppo—until the unthinkable happens.
When all they love is destroyed by war, Nuri knows they have no choice except to leave their home. But escaping Syria will be no easy task: Afra has lost her sight, leaving Nuri to navigate her grief as well as a perilous journey through Turkey and Greece toward an uncertain future in Britain.
Nuri is sustained only by the knowledge that waiting for them is his cousin Mustafa, who has started an apiary in Yorkshire and is teaching fellow refugees beekeeping. As Nuri and Afra travel through a broken world, they must confront not only the pain of their own unspeakable loss but dangers that would overwhelm even the bravest souls. Above all, they must make the difficult journey back to each other, a path once so familiar yet rendered foreign by the heartache of displacement.
Moving, intimate, and beautifully written, The Beekeeper of Aleppo is a book for our times: a novel that at once reminds us that the most peaceful and ordinary lives can be utterly upended in unimaginable ways and brings a journey in faraway lands close to home, never to be forgotten. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1980
• Raised—London, England, UK
• Education—B.A., Brunel University
• Currently—lives in London
Brought up in London, Christy Lefteri is the child of Cypriot refugees. She is a lecturer in creative writing at Brunel University. The Beekeeper of Aleppo was born out of her time working as a volunteer at a UNICEF-supported refugee center in Athens. She is the author of the novel The Beekeeper of Aleppo (2019). (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
In recounting the daily brutality as well as the glimmers of beauty, this novel humanizes the terrifying refugee stories we read about in the news. Lefteri explores questions of trust and portrays what trauma and loss can do to individuals and their relationships.… A beautiful rumination on seeing what is right in front of us—both the negative and the positive.
Boston Globe
Beekeeper Nuri and his wife, Afra, are devastated by the Syrian civil war. After violence claims their child and Afra’s eyesight, the couple is forced to flee Aleppo and make the fraught journey to Britain—and an uncertain future ("5 Books Not to Miss").
USA Today
[Christy] Lefteri sensitively charts what it’s like when war comes home, alert to the subtle effects of trauma and grief. Nuri and Afra are not broadly sketched as victims, but rather suffer in different and complex ways from PTSD.… By creating characters with such rich, complex inner lives, Lefteri shows that in order to stretch compassion to millions of people, it helps to begin with one.
Time
[H]aunting and resonant story of Syrian war refugees undertaking a treacherous journey…. Lefteri perceptively and powerfully documents the horrors of the Syrian civil war…. Readers will find this deeply affecting for both its psychological intensity and emotional acuity.
Publishers Weekly
In fluid, forthright language, Lefteri brings us closer to the refugee experience as beekeeper Nuri and his wife… escape Aleppo and travel dangerously to Great Britain.… There’s no overloading the deck with drama; this story tells itself, absorbingly and heartrendingly.
Library Journal
Nuri’s fluid narration merges past and present into a patchwork of memory, pain, loss, and hope…. With determination laden in sorrow, Nuri and Afra strive to find their way to a new life and back to each other.
Booklist
(Starred review) [T]ouching and terrifying.… Nuri's story rings with authenticity, from the vast, impersonal cruelties of war to the tiny kindnesses that help people survive it..… A well-crafted structure and a troubled but engaging narrator power this moving story of Syrian refugees.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, use our LitLovers talking points to help start a discussion for THE BEEKEEPER OF ALEPPO … then take off on your own:
1. What kind of life did Nuri and Afra have as a family in Aleppo. Can you imagine having your life destroyed in front of your eyes and being forced to leave it all behind as Nuri and Afra did?
2. Talk about the hardships of the couple's journey across Europe, on their way to Great Britain. Discuss the hatred and prejudice they endured, as well as physical dangers. What horrified you most in that journey?
3. The trauma of their journey has left both Nuri and Afra deeply scarred. Talk about the way it has opened a seemingly unbridgeable gulf between the couple. Nuri is our narrator and thinks of Afra as "locked in." What in Afra's behavior leads to Nuri's assessment?
4. (Follow-up to Question XX) How is Nuri affected? He believes he no longer worthy of her or her forgiveness. Why does believe that?
5. Can you imagine what life would be like for this couple and the millions of others, who are waiting in limbo, neither able to move forward with their lives nor return the life behind them. Talk about what the limbo and dislocation would feel like. How well do you think Christy Lefteri has captured those feelings and experiences? Has reading the Beekeeper of Aleppo, led you to a different understanding, a deeper empathy perhaps, regarding refugees? Or is the problem so vast, so painful, that it remains almost impossible, as a single individual, to grasp?
6. Does this book offer hope?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online and off, with attribution. Thanks.)
American Spy
Lauren Wilkinson, 2019
Random House
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780812988284
Summary
What if your sense of duty required you to betray the man you love?
It’s 1986, the heart of the Cold War, and Marie Mitchell is an intelligence officer with the FBI. She’s brilliant, but she’s also a young black woman working in an old boys’ club. Her career has stalled out, she’s overlooked for every high-profile squad, and her days are filled with monotonous paperwork.
So when she’s given the opportunity to join a shadowy task force aimed at undermining Thomas Sankara, the charismatic revolutionary president of Burkina Faso whose Communist ideology has made him a target for American intervention, she says yes.
Yes, even though she secretly admires the work Sankara is doing for his country.
Yes, even though she is still grieving the mysterious death of her sister, whose example led Marie to this career path in the first place.
Yes, even though a furious part of her suspects she’s being offered the job because of her appearance and not her talent.
In the year that follows, Marie will observe Sankara, seduce him, and ultimately have a hand in the coup that will bring him down. But doing so will change everything she believes about what it means to be a spy, a lover, a sister, and a good American.
Inspired by true events—Thomas Sankara is known as "Africa’s Che Guevara"—American Spy knits together a gripping spy thriller, a heartbreaking family drama, and a passionate romance. This is a face of the Cold War you’ve never seen before, and it introduces a powerful new literary voice. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
Lauren Wilkinson earned an MFA in fiction and literary translation from Columbia University, and has taught writing at Columbia and the Fashion Institute of Technology.
She was a 2013 Center for Fiction Emerging Writers Fellow, and has also received support from the MacDowell Colony and the Djerassi Resident Artists Program. Wilkinson grew up in New York and lives on the Lower East Side. American Spy is her first novel. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
[W]hile embracing ambitions and concerns that don’t always figure highly in the spy genre, [American Spy] is first and foremost a thriller…. Plenty to enjoy on its own terms, then, as a slick, well-observed thriller, but what adds depth are the perspectives offered by the central character…. [C]hallenging boundaries is what brave fiction does, and Wilkinson proves confident enough to carry it off. For a debut novel it’s remarkably assured, earning its genre stripes with panache, and addressing thought-provoking issues along the way.
New York Times Book Review
Lauren Wilkinson’s new novel, American Spy, is extraordinary in a lot of ways—most obviously because it places a female African American intelligence officer… at the center of a Cold War tale of political espionage. But also striking is the novel’s deeper recognition that, to some extent, rudimentary tradecraft is something all of her African American characters have learned as an everyday survival skill…. American Spy is a morally nuanced and atmospheric political thriller.
Washington Post
[Wilkinson's] first novel starts off with a literal bang, and never once lets up. American Spy is a beautifully paced spy thriller as well as a promising debut from a writer who's not content to rely on the settled tropes of any literary genre…. Wilkinson packs a lot of plot into American Spy…. But [she] handles the several threads in the novel deftly, and she has a real gift for pacing…. Above all, it's just so much fun to read ... [American Spy] marks the debut of an immensely talented writer who's refreshingly unafraid to take risks, and has the skills to make those risks pay off.
NPR
(Starred review) [U]nflinching, incendiary debut… a thrilling, razor-sharp examination of race, nationalism, and U.S. foreign policy that is certain to make Wilkinson’s name as one of the most engaging and perceptive young writers working today.
Publishers Weekly
Wilkinson works within the true history of Burkina Faso, blending high-stakes political drama and Marie’s contemplation of the sister she lost and what her own choices will mean for her sons. Appealing in its insightful characterizations, well-plotted action, and rich settings, this should find a large audience.
Booklist
There are many tangled strands to unravel here… [and] Wilkinson… navigates… this tale of divided loyalties with the poise of such classic masters as Eric Ambler and Graham Greene…. Wilkinson’s book is a noteworthy contribution.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, use our LitLovers Book Club Resources. They can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
(Resources by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online and off, with attribution. Thanks.)
The Idiot
Elif Batuman, 2017
Penguin Publishing
432 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781594205613
Summary
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, and befriends her charismatic and worldly Serbian classmate, Svetlana.
Almost by accident, Selin 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. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—June 7, 1977
• Where—New York City, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., Harvard University; Ph.D., Stanford University
• Awards—Whiting Award
• Currently—lives in New York City, New York
Elif Batuman was born in New York City to Turkish parents and grew up in New Jersey. She graduated from Harvard and received her doctorate in comparative literature from Stanford University. While in graduate school, Batuman studied the Uzbek language in Samarkand, Uzbekistan.
In February 2010, Batuman published her first book, The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them. The essays detail her experiences as a graduate student and are based on material previously published in The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, and n+1.
Batuman's debut novel, The Idiot, a semi-autobiographical bildingsroman, came out in 2017 to high critical praise.
From 2010 to 2013, Batuman was writer-in-residence at Koc University in Istanbul, Turkey. She now lives in New York City. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 12/12/2017.)
Book Reviews
Small pleasures will have to sustain you oer the long haul of this novel. The Idiot builds little narrative or emotional force. It is like a beautiful neon sign made without a plug. No glow is cast.
Dwight Garner - New York Times
[A] hefty, gorgeous, digressive slab of a book.… Batuman is an energetic and charming writer…there is more oxygen, more life in this book, than in a shelf of its peers. And in the way of the best characters, Batuman's creations are not bound by the book that created them. They seem released into the world. Long after I finished The Idiot, I looked at every lanky girl with her nose in a book on the subway and thought: Selin.
Parul Sehgal - New York Times Book Review
Batuman has won a Paris Review Terry Southern Prize for humor, and her book is consistently hilarious. If this is a sentimental education, it’s one leavened by a great deal of mordant and delightful humor.… At once a cutting satire of academia, a fresh take on the epistolary novel, a poignant bildungsroman, and compelling travel literature, The Idiot is also a touching and spirited portrait of the artist as a hugely appealing young woman.
Boston Globe
Beautifully written first novel…Batuman, a staff writer for the New Yorker, has an extraordinarily deft touch when it comes to sketching character…The novel fairly brims with provocative ideas about language, literature and culture.
Associated Press
Charming, hilarious and wise debut novel.… Batuman titled the book The Idiot (after Dostoevsky’s famous novel) but it isn't an excoriation of its heroine. Instead, it's a fond reflection. Oh, you poor, silly idiot, she seems to be saying. The Idiot, a novel of innocence and experience, is infused with the generous attitude that Dag Hammarskjöld expressed in his memoir Markings, "For all that has been, Thank you. For all that is to come, Yes!"
Dallas News
With her smart and deliciously comic 2010 debut, the essay collection “The Possessed,” Elif Batuman wrote one of the 21st century’s great love letters to reading.… It was a tour de force intellectual comedy encasing an apologia for literary obsession.… A different — though no less tenuous — variety of possession is explored in “The Idiot,” Batuman’s first nove.… The book’s pleasures come not from the 400-page, low-and-slow smolder of its central relationship, which can at times feel like nothing more than two repressions circling one another; rather, it is Selin herself. Acutely self-conscious but fiercely intelligent, she consistently renders a strange, mordantly funny and precisely observed world.… Selin’s is a consciousness one does not want to part with; by the end of the book, I felt as if I were in the presence of a strange, slightly detached, utterly brilliant friend. “I kept thinking about the uneven quality of time,” she writes, “the way it was almost always so empty, and then with no warning came a few days that felt so dense and alive and real that it seemed indisputable that that was what life was, that its real nature had finally been revealed.” Batuman articulates those little moments — of revelation and of emptiness — as well as anyone writing today. The book’s legacy seems destined to be one of observation, not character — though when the observer is this gifted, is that really any wonder?
Los Angeles Times
A vibrant novel of ideas.… Like her essays, Batuman’s bildungsroman is a succession of droll misadventures built around chance encounters, peculiar conversations and sharp-eyed observations. Both on campus and abroad, she brings the ever-fresh perspective of a perpetual stranger in a strange land. Her deceptively simple declarative sentences are underpinned by a poker-faced sense of absurdity and humor so dry it calls for olives.
San Francisco Chronicle
Easily the funniest book I’ve read this year.
GQ
Masterly funny debut novel . . Erudite but never pretentious, The Idiot will make you crave more books by Batuman.
Sloane Crosley - Vanity Fair
Batuman wittily and wisely captures the tribulations of a shy, cerebral teenager struggling with love, friendship, and whether to take psycholinguistics or philosophy of language . . . Batuman’s writing is funny and deadpan, and Selin’s observations tease out many relatable human quandaries surrounding friendship, social niceties and first love. The result: a novel that may not keep readers up late turning pages feverishly, but that will quietly amuse and provoke thought.
Huffington Post
Batuman’s brainy novel is leavened with humor and a heroine incapable of artifice.
People
The Idiot is wonderful. Batuman, a staff writer at the New Yorker and the author of the sparkling autobiographical essay collection The Possessed (2010), has brave and original ideas about what a “novel” might mean and no qualms about flouting literary convention. She is endlessly beguiled by the possibilities and shortcomings of language.… It is a pleasure to watch Batuman render this process with the wit, sensitivity, and relish of someone who’s successfully emerged on the other side of it. For all of her fascination with linguistic puzzle boxes, the author tempers her protagonist’s intellectual vertigo with maturity and common sense.
Slate
The Idiot is half The Education of Henry Adams and half Innocents Abroad. Twain would have savored Selin's first international trip to Paris, Hungary and Turkey.… Our first footsteps into adulthood are often memorable. Taking them in Selin's shoes is an entertaining, intellectual journey not to be missed.
Shelf Awareness
(Starred review.) [W]onderful.… Selin narrates with fluent wit and inexorable intelligence … in prose as deceptively light as it is ambitious. One character wonders whether it’s possible "to be sincere without sounding pretentious," and this long-awaited and engrossing novel delivers a resounding yes.
Publishers Weekly
In this semiautobiographical debut novel, New Yorker writer and National Book Critics Circle finalist Batuman delightfully captures the hyperstimulation and absurdity of the first-year university experience.… [L]ighthearted and wry, with occasional laugh-out-loud zingers. —Reba Leiding, emeritus, James Madison Univ. Lib., Harrisonburg, VA
Library Journal
(Starred review.) Selin is entrancing—so smart, so clueless, so funny—and Batuman’s exceptional discernment, comedic brilliance, and soulful inquisitiveness generate a charmingly incisive and resonant tale of themessy forging of a self.
Booklist
(Starred review.) Selin is delightful company.… [H]er off-kilter relationship to the world around her is revelatory and, often, mordantly hilarious. Readers who are willing to travel with Selin at her own contemplative pace will be grateful that they did. Self-aware, cerebral, and delightful.”
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, please use our LitLovers talking points to help start a discussion for The Idiot … and then take off on your own:
1. How would you describe Selin as she enters Harvard in the fall of 1995? Innocent? Passive? Smart, of course … but in what ways? And how is she not so smart in other ways?
2. What about Svetlana? Describe her? How is she different from Selin? What is it about Svetlana, as well as other classmates, that Selin envies?
3. Comparing herself to those classmates, Selin says, "I went from class to class, read hundreds, thousands of pages … and nothing happened." What does she mean that nothing has happened? What does she want to happen?
4. Talk about the crush Selina develops on Ivan. What do you think of him? What is it that attracts Selin to him and makes her fall for him? How does email, which is new in 1995, affect the tenor of their correspondence? What was your feeling toward Selin as she became increasingly infatuated?
5. Selin's wishes "to live a life unmarred by laziness, cowardice, and conformity." Does she live up to her ideal? If you were to elucidate — in three words — your own values for living, what words would those be?
6. Talk about Selin's attachment to reading and to literature. Consider, for example, that she buys an overcoat because it reminded her of Gogol. Why is literature such a potent force in her life?
7. Selin believes that you can know what books really mean: "You could get the meaning, or you could miss it completely." Is her assessment of literature correct? Do you think that literature should "mean" something, that books have some overarching, or underlying, significance? Or are books, some books, say, primarily a compendium of observations and insights as to the nature of life? Does Elif Batuman's novel have meaning … or a meaning?
8. What is the point of the story about the host leaving a stuffed weasel in a guest room? — "if you really wanted to be a writer, you didn't send away the weasel."
9. Talk about the significance of the book's title? Consider that the word originally (in Greek) referred to the self, to someone who is private and keeps to herself. But it might also refer to its more common usage: a lack of intelligence or stupidity. How do you see its use as the title?
10. Selin wants to learn from books how to live life, to use novels like self-help books. Is she mistakenly naive? Can one do that? If we don't learn about diverse ways of living from literature, why do we read — purely for entertainment and escape?
11. Did you find this book "mordantly funny," even hilarious as many critics did? Smart and intellectually bracing? Too smart and intellectual? Lacking emotional urgency? Long winded? In other words, how did you experience The Idiot?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online and off, with attribution. Thanks.)