The Idiot: A Novel

If I could tell you about this Pulitzer finalist by quoting the last line, I would! Alas, that might feel spoilery—and so instead I’ll begin at the beginning of this autobiographical novel, in which Selin, the daughter of Turkish immigrants, enters her freshman year at Harvard in 1995 and has to figure out how to use email. As she begins emailing her classmates—and one classmate in particular, a boy named Ivan—she starts to see how the relationships she forms through the written word are markedly different from the ones she creates in the rest of her life. Selin is fascinated by the way language shapes thought, and by the relationship between her actual life and the life lived in books. This may sound quite esoteric, but Selin is warm and funny, as is her first person narrative, and the questions that captivate her will be interesting food for thought for many lovers of literature.