Roman Year

""Aciman evokes the passing of time in rich, meandering prose, rebuilding 1960s Rome in sentences suffused with light and sound and memories . . . Roman Year is both an affecting coming-of-age story and a timely, distinctive description of the haunted lives of refugees."" --Aminatta Forna, The New York Times ""Aciman is a sensitive and passionate writer, and this volume's packed with human incident: friendships, meals, sex, politics and culture, music, film, art . . . A brave, sensuous, tender chronicle."" --Joan Frank, The Boston Globe ""In rapturous prose, Aciman captures the shocks of beauty he experienced . . . during what amounted to a brief interlude on his way to the U.S. His poetic exploration of place and probing of what constitutes a home makes for exquisitely moving reading."" --Publishers Weekly (starred review) ""A writer's emotional center of gravity and his authorial vision emerge in a wistfully remembered adolescent moment in Rome."" --Booklist (starred review) ""Fans of André Aciman's novel Call Me by Your Name will swoon for this vivid, heartfelt account of the time he spent as a teenager in Rome . . . A standout memoir from a master of emotional nuance who always reminds us to 'look for the human.'"" --Jessica Olin, Oprah Daily ""The very roughness and uncertainty of life on Via Clelia, its grinding awfulness and its flashes of beauty, evidently transformed this perpetually displaced teenage refugee into a writer who has become a consummate poet of sublime, fugitive moments . . . As a Jew of the diaspora, as the child of a deaf woman (who was also a proficient lip-reader), as a refugee from storied Alexandria, [Aciman] experienced language, place, family, education, sexuality, wealth and poverty, beauty and ugliness in complicated mixtures that have given his writing its poignancy and its versatility, not to mention flashes of wicked humor . . . [A] remarkable memoir."" --Ingrid Rowland, American Scholar