“A story of love and youth and pain that will have you clutching at your heart. I want everyone to read it; I want to press it into people’s hands. Surely one of the best novels I’ve ever read.” —Andrew Sean Greer, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Less and Less Is Lost **Soon to be a major film adaptation by Luca Guadagnino,Separate Roomsis a masterpiece of Italian literature, and a heartbreaking portrait of love, grief, and the daily realities of being a gay man in 1980s Europe.** Thomas, a young German musician, is dying. His older boyfriend, a renowned Italian writer named Leo, finds it impossible to watch the slow and inevitable demise of his lover. So, he condemns himself to wandering the earth instead, moving cities every few weeks in the hope of finding the dividing line between the living and the dead. He travels through Europe where past and present overlap, years merge and faces emerge, and reminders of the life he and Thomas shared are on every corner. From their meeting and nights spent in Paris to the drug-induced flight through the forests of northern France that spelled the end, Leo’s memories become clearer with every road he takes—much as he wishes he could simply forget. While alive, and wanting to preserve the passion of their relationship, Leo had forced Thomas to live in separate rooms, separate towns, with separate lives. But now, face to face with true solitude, Leo must finally reckon with the impossible striving of memory to recreate life and, ultimately, cross an ocean to find the strength to go on. André Aciman’s Call Me by Your Name meets Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous in Pier Vittorio Tondelli’s Separate Rooms: a singular and unforgettable meditation on almost-ideal love, told in three musical movements, by a treasured literary talent never before published in the US.
Authors
André Aciman was born in Alexandria, Egypt and is an American memoirist, essayist, novelist, and scholar of seventeenth-century literature. He has also written many essays and reviews on Marcel Proust. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, The Paris Review, The New Republic, Condé Nast Traveler as well as in many volumes of The Best American Essays. Aciman received his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Harvard University, has taught at Princeton and Bard and is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at The CUNY Graduate Center. He is currently chair of the Ph. D. Program in Comparative Literature and founder and director of The Writers' Institute at the Graduate Center. Aciman is the author of the Whiting Award-winning memoir Out of Egypt (1995), an account of his childhood as a Jew growing up in post-colonial Egypt. Aciman has published two other books: False Papers: Essays in Exile and Memory (2001), and a novel Call Me By Your Name (2007), which was chosen as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and won the Lambda Literary Award for Men's Fiction (2008). His forthcoming novel Eight White Nights (FSG) will be published on February 14, 2010
