Description

Discover TikTok’s new favourite book.

‘I loved it and could have read a thousand more pages of it’ Emma Cline, author of The Girls

Selin, a tall, highly strung Turkish-American from New Jersey turns up at Harvard with no idea what to expect. What she doesn’t expect is:

– How much time she will spend thinking about language and its limitations
– An opinionated cosmopolitan Serb named Svetlana, who will become her confidante
– A mathematician from Hungary called Ivan, whom she will obsess over when she is supposed to be studying
– Feeling dangerously overwhelmed by the challenges and possibilities of adulthood

But most of all, Selin does not expect to embark on a study of precisely how baffling love can be when you are trying to forge a self…
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PRAISE FOR THE IDIOT:
‘A moving, continent-hopping coming-of-age story’ Observer
‘Elif Batuman surely has one of the best senses of humour…refreshing and unique’ Sheila Heti
‘Full of zingy one-liners’ Financial Times
‘Hilarious, brilliant observations about writing, life and crushes’ Curtis Sittenfeld
‘Delightful and slyly funny’ Red

Publisher Review

I loved it and could have read a thousand more pages of it. It presented this almost moment-by-moment experience of life, in a way that I just felt Batuman had so much control. There's so much wit and pleasure in her writing you feel very comfortable being in the world she's created. -- Emma Cline, author of THE GIRLS Elif Batuman is a writer whose byline creates a flutter of anticipation... If a dominant mode of her generation is knowing introspection, she writes with a bewildered outrospection that delights in the bathetic and the absurd... It's a novel about being young and stupid that's both wise and clever - and it's a treat. * Evening Standard * Elif Batuman surely has one of the best senses of humour in American letters. The pleasure she takes in observing the eccentricities of each of her characters makes for a really refreshing and unique bildungsroman; one more fascinated with what's going on around and outside the bewildered protagonist, than what s going on inside her. -- Sheila Heti, author of HOW SHOULD A PERSON BE? and TICKNOR Each paragraph is a small anthology of well-made observations... Batuman has a rich sense of the details of human attachment and lust. -- Dwight Garner * New York Times * Beautifully written... a wry, funny coming-of-age story set at the dawn of email among a group of Harvard brainiacs too nerdy and self-involved to even think about sex, drugs and drinking. * Daily Mail *