book review find me

Find Me, the Call Me By Your Name sequel, is tender, melancholy, and deeply flawed

In André Aciman’s new novel, Elio and Oliver reunite at last. Eventually.

by Constance Grady

Call Me By Your Name is a book that throbs with desire. André Aciman’s 2007 novel (and the basis for the 2017 film of the same title ) is a portrait of adolescent love and lust, experienced for the first time with an intensity that’s almost frightening in how all-consuming it feels. And Aciman devotes himself to chronicling every fleeting fantasy, every caress, with a fervor that matches what his characters are feeling.

Find Me , Aciman’s new sequel to Call Me By Your Name , is gentler and more melancholy than its predecessor. It’s not about first love but about true love, and specifically true love that is marred by lives lived out of sync. It’s about loving someone at exactly the wrong moment in time and finding your way through everything that follows regardless.

Elio and Oliver, the lovers from Call Me By Your Name , are the couple at the heart of Find Me , just as they were the heart of the earlier book. Their connection was both first love and true love, and the fact that their parting was a matter of timing is what gives Find Me its thematic weight: Their romance came at the wrong time — Elio was 17 and Oliver 24, and shortly after they said goodbye Oliver decided to marry a woman — and now both of them are living with the consequences.

But it takes a long time for Aciman to find his way back to Elio and Oliver. Find Me is a four-act book, and the first and longest act — set 10 years after the events of Call Me By Your Name — is about Elio’s father Samuel and his budding romance with a woman named Miranda who is half his age. Elio takes over as the point-of-view character in the second act after a five-year time jump, and Oliver in the third after another time jump. However, it’s not until the fourth act that the two lovers are finally reunited.

That delay is effective at building tension. But it’s also frustrating, because it means we spend a lot of time with Samuel and Miranda as Aciman hammers home his chosen themes. And Samuel and Miranda are not particularly interesting characters.

Almost all of Aciman’s characters talk like horny philosophy textbooks. Sometimes it works better than others.

Samuel and Miranda spend most of their time on the page together navigating the age gap between them, and it’s clear that for Aciman, that gap is not incidental. It’s a key to the theme of Find Me : Samuel and Miranda have met each other at the wrong moment in time, because for most of Samuel’s life, Miranda either was not born or was too young, and so although they were meant for one another their circumstances kept them apart, and now they will have only the end of Samuel’s life together.

It’s a romantic notion, and Aciman writes it in his most exalted, lyrical prose, letting his characters pile one destiny-driven vow on top of another in cascading sentences: “There will be no sorrow from me, and none from you,” Samuel tells Miranda, “because you’ll know as I’ll know that whatever time you’ve given me, my entire life, from childhood, school years, university, my years as a professor, a writer, and all the rest that happened was all leading up to you.”

But the age difference between them also means Aciman is doubling down on the age gap between Elio and Oliver in Call Me By Your Name , which was significant enough to cause a controversy during the film adaptation’s Oscar campaign. And the age difference feels all the more pointed in Find Me , because where Elio and Oliver were fully distinct characters with coherent psychologies and opposing points of view, Miranda and Samuel exist only as shallow outlines: Samuel represents wise and cosmopolitan age and Miranda is his perfect reflection in a young and vigorous body. That is the dynamic that Aciman seems interested in to the exclusion of all else, and the second time he writes it, it’s less convincing than the first.

Because Samuel and Miranda aren’t real characters, when they settle into the quasi-symposium that in Aciman’s worldview is the natural prelude to sex, their rapport doesn’t quite ring true. Which is surprising, because usually those symposiums work for Aciman even when they shouldn’t.

Nearly all of Aciman’s characters speak in philosophical paragraphs that aren’t meant to resemble normal human speech patterns so much as create an opportunity for Aciman to throw ideas around: In Aciman’s novels, discourse is what creates the possibility for sex, so sex is always both preceded and followed by debates about eros and art and the body.

And Aciman generally writes those debates with an endearing disregard for the rules of psychological realism like “show don’t tell.” With the occasional exception of Oliver, all of Aciman’s characters know exactly how they feel at any given moment and are more than happy to explain it to one another in exacting, precise detail. Those explanations rarely feel realistic, but when Oliver and Elio were delivering them to each other in both Call Me By Your Name and toward the end of Find Me , they were so drenched in emotion that I was more than willing to go along for the ride.

But the emotion never quite comes through with Samuel and Miranda, because Aciman hasn’t made the effort to turn them into more than flat types. As a result, their symposiums feel like just that: symposiums, without the undercurrent of love and desire and fear that made Elio and Oliver’s symposiums so compelling.

Things improve slightly in Find Me ’s second act, when Elio takes center stage as the point-of-view character, bringing with him an air of self-deprecation that goes a long way toward making all of his speechifying palatable. He’s now in his 30s, and in a continuation of the age difference theme, he’s falling in love with a man who is twice his age.

Elio’s new partner is named Michel, and he is the only person in Elio’s life who can compare to Oliver: “There’s only been the two of you,” Elio tells Michel. “All the others were occasionals. You have given me days that justify the years I’ve been without him.” Both Michel and Elio know that Oliver is Elio’s true love, but in the 15 years since Call Me By Your Name , Elio has been able to live his life openly and unapologetically enough to find a runner-up second love.

Oliver, who finally makes his first appearance in the third act, has not been so lucky. Because he chose to reject Elio and with Elio his true self, he hasn’t been able to make an authentic connection with anyone since their parting 20 years ago. He is amicable with his wife because they make a good team, and he half-heartedly pursues trysts with friends of both genders. But when a house guest plays for him the same piano piece that Elio played for him in Call Me By Your Name , Oliver is overcome with memories of Elio. “I knew,” he thinks, “that some arcane and beguiling wording was being spoken about what my life had been, and might still be, or might never be, and that the choice rested on the keyboard itself and me.”

It’s in Oliver’s storyline that Find Me delivers its most achingly lovely passages, because Oliver is the only one of Aciman’s characters who is capable of self-deception, who does not always know immediately and instinctively which of his feelings to trust and how to give voice to them. That makes Oliver’s arc a tragedy, but it also means that only in his narration are multiple layers of emotion allowed to exist and mingle moodily on the page together.

It takes until the novel’s fourth and final act for Oliver and Elio to finally meet on the page in a tender, lyrical epilogue that is the culmination of all the meditation on wasted time that came before. Since all Aciman’s readers really want is to see Oliver and Elio together again, all that came before this reunion made for a frustrating and occasionally clumsy wait — but the payoff makes you feel every bit of the years of separation both characters had to live through, waiting for their lives to sync up once again.

And as the pair comes together, Aciman’s prose is no longer filled with the all-consuming passion that animated Call Me By Your Name . Instead, he narrates their encounter with a sweetness and tentativeness that fits this gentle, melancholy book.

“Time,” says Oliver, and Elio understands “that what he’d meant was that too much time had gone by.” But soon, Elio realizes that “despite two decades we were not a day older than the two young men we’d been so long ago.”

What makes Find Me work, when it does work, is that it allows you to feel both of those concepts at once: Time goes by, terrible and insurmountable — and also it doesn’t matter at all.

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Andre aciman’s ‘call me by your name’ sequel ‘find me’: book review.

THR review: Andre Aciman’s 'Call Me by Your Name’ Sequel ‘Find Me,’ follow-up to the beloved queer romance (adapted into an Oscar-winning film in 2017), picks up more than a decade after the events of the first novel.

By Kevin Sessums

Kevin Sessums

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How to begin when you have already experienced an ending? 

That was the question I asked myself when confronted with the imperative sentence that is the title of Andre Aciman’s follow-up novel — OK, sequel — to his best-selling Call Me by Your Name (2007). The preening appreciation of many Call Me by Your Name readers borders on the cult-like, and they have for months expressed a mixture of measured anticipation and possessive concern that this sequel, Find Me , will, in fact, find them disappointed by the continuation of the first novel’s story about the affair between a 17-year-old boy and a young man of 24. That affair allowed Aciman to preen a bit himself with his knowledge of Greek literature and philosophy and music, as well as the enticing geography of both the verdant northern regions of Italy and the virile southern regions of the male body. He also got to write about a peach.

The acclaimed 2017 film based on Call Me by Your Name was, to me, an improvement on the source material. The keen-eyed screenwriter James Ivory rightfully won an Oscar for gleaning a more stringent strain of love story from the gloss-and-dross of Aciman’s prose, which has a geography all its own filled with isthmuses of metaphors and olive groves of allusions with alas neither an inland nor an inside leg left for irony.

That much-needed irony, even a whiff of ennobling wit, was found in the lovely performances of Timothée Chalamet as Elio and Michael Stuhlbarg as his father, Samuel, a deeply empathetic archeology professor — as well as Armie Hammer as Oliver, Samuel’s graduate assistant, who visits the family at their Italian compound that enchanted summer and not only reshapes their lives, but also, ultimately, it seems, their very concept of time. 

That’s a whole lot of reshaping to shove into the mighty allure of one character. But just as Hammer transcended what was, to my eye, his miscasting, Aciman’s prose transcends its own grand neediness for knowledge and all that knowledge cannot know when distilled into another imperative sentence issued as an unspoken, unwritten admonition from both books: the Delphic maxim, “Know Thyself.” Elio and Oliver indeed know themselves more deeply for having known and loved each other.

Luca Guadagnino, the director of the film, found a way to navigate the story with a swooning kind of poise that eludes Aciman, with all his swanning and swerving. In Find Me , the author is still flaunting that way he has found to allow a story to occur in the temporal musings that swarm the mind — delighted by its own education and erudition — rather than in linear time’s own stricter, less bemused demands. Yet I sometimes find the swanning and swerving more maddening than masterly. I often long to stop it in its expensively shod tracks in order to scrape the academic mud from the Wellingtons in which Aciman strikes a pose, for example, in this sequel’s second section. That stretch of the novel strands us in the French countryside with Elio, who now teaches piano in Paris about 15 years after the first book began, and a new male lover, a much older lawyer named Michel.

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But even with all the epistemological falderal, these two books are, at their hearts, highfalutin romance novels. That is their deep and understandable appeal, and their undying folly. If Greek-Egyptian poet Constantine Cavafy had experienced literary coitus with English romance novelist Barbara Cartland, the result would have been something like Call Me by Your Name and Find Me .

Find Me  begins with a resurrection. Elio’s father, Samuel, has died by the end of the first book, but in the opening section of the new novel he is very much alive. On a train to Rome to meet up with Elio, Samuel meets a young woman named Miranda in the compartment they share along with her dog. It is a decade before the ending of the first book; Samuel is more than a decade older than this woman, who takes him to her enfeebled-though-still-fabulous father’s place for lunch when they arrive in Rome after much flirtatious badinage flutters between them, a veritable aviary of deflection and desire. 

Samuel and Miranda fall into bed and madly in love in a hoary whirlwind of messy sheets and florid writing. Aciman actually describes Miranda’s vagina as feeling as if it were a ripened fig opening onto Samuel’s penis as she lowers herself onto it; Miranda, when it’s her turn, describes Samuel’s erect penis as her “lighthouse.”

That word choice made me think of Virginia Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse , which had its own sectioned structure, the second of which is titled “Time Passes.” Find Me ’s plot, like Woolf’s, is also but an adjunct to its more deeply felt philosophical musings about love, absence and death. (It’s a close call as to which I find more audacious: Woolf’s technique in achieving multiple focalizations in To the Lighthouse or Samuel’s lighthouse and its technique in achieving for Miranda, one presumes, multiple orgasms. Facetious? Not really. This is Aciman’s literary lane — a byway of soft shoulders, hard bodies and surprising intersections where the wolfish and the Woolf-like collide.  Reading him is much like rubbernecking at such collisions.)

Elio and the much older Michel fall in love as quickly in the second section as Miranda and the much older Samuel do in the first. This is a novel about the stirrings of father fixations as much as it is about fate’s steering mechanism in the making of the narrative of lives, loves and novels. The lovemaking of Elio and Michel is rendered with a kind of tender resolve that borders on treacle; it’s all rather quaint and queer, in every sense of that latter word, especially compared with the first section in which Samuel and Miranda boff with abandon. 

The sections of Find Me are titled with the annotations of musical composition. The first is called “Tempo,” and has a pace that is rather startling, jump-starting the book with Miranda’s jaunty air pushing back against Samuel’s jaundiced one. The section is filled with the wondrous smell of her.

The novel’s second part “Cadenza” — which, in music, denotes a solo passage of virtuosic talent (Elio may be performing a duet with Michel, but it feels like a solo) — has not the smell of flesh but of emollients lining the shower and shelves in Michel’s country estate, as well as of the soaps he uses on Elio’s naked body as he insists Elio keep his eyes closed. That encounter makes for a rather creepy scene that is, one presumes, supposed to be about adoration and trust but instead reminds one of a father giving his child a bath.

The third section of Find Me is titled “Capriccio,” which, musically, connotes something improvised and brief — and in painting means that there are facets of fantasy present, and one must ferret out what is real and what is imagined. This part of the novel catches up with Oliver, now a father of two grown sons, and his wife, Micol, as he is finishing up a teaching sabbatical from his school in New Hampshire. He has spent the sabbatical in New York City, where he has been lecturing on the pre-Socratics, whose inquiry was based on the natural world.

The section centers on Oliver yet again departing — specifically on a going-away party for his wife and him at which Oliver moons over two guests he has invited: a young gay colleague at the New York City university and a young woman who stretches on a neighboring mat at his yoga class. The section is infused with the fluidity of Oliver’s bisexuality, as well the internal dialogues he is having with the idealized Elio, each still trying to find himself in the ether of time and the either of the other. 

We are informed that the gay colleague has been working on a book about the Russian pianist Samuil Feinberg. And thus he sits down at the old Steinway during the party’s denouement — as well as the book’s — and begins to play Bach’s achingly beautiful “Arioso,” which is what Elio had played during that other long-ago departure that still underscores Oliver’s musings.

The current objects of Oliver’s desire — the pianist who has served his purpose (and the author’s) and the afterthought of a yoga partner, the latest stand-in for the parameters that women have offered Oliver in a kind of purloined life — exit the party and Oliver is left with his wife. She heads to bed. No boffing with abandon for them; not even the treacle of reticence. Oliver stays behind to clean up and descries, no longer mooning over others, the moon itself outside noticing him with its accusatory fullness, this professor closing in on 50 who forms public notions about the natural world within the context of classical thought — and private notions about it within the context of his memories of an idyllic Italy. 

“Music is no more than the sound of our regrets put to a cadence that stirs the illusion of pleasure and hope,” Bach says in another of Oliver’s internal dialogues, speaking to him amid the deafening silence of the life he has chosen even as the life that once chose him — and which he rejected — refuses to remain unheard. It beckons him through Bach to find it again. “It’s the surest reminder that we’re here for a very short while and that we’ve neglected or cheated or, worse yet, failed to live our lives. Music is the unlived life,” the composer explains. “You’ve lived the wrong life, my friend,” says Bach, “and almost defaced the one you were given to live.”

“What do I want?” asks Oliver. “Do you know the answer, Herr Bach? Is there such a thing as a right or wrong life?”

“I’m an artist, my friend,” Bach says. “I don’t do answers. Artists know questions only.”

In Find Me ’s final section, called “Da Capo” — a musical term that means “back to the beginning” or, translated literally, “from the head” — we are transported, in essence, to the ending of Call Me by Your Name . Oliver is back in Italy with Elio. There are still, however, a few unanswered questions.

But as for the answer to the question posed at the beginning of this review — How to begin when you have already experienced an ending? — I would suggest you read some Cavafy and Woolf. Skip the Cartland. Listen to Bach while reading Aciman’s sentences, which can be maddening but adhere hauntingly to the rhythms of Bach’s brilliant clarity when you expect them instead to vault into the realm of Vivaldi ruined by Liberace.

More important, listen deeply to the longing of your own heart and its own language while reading Aciman’s. Allow them to coalesce. Continue to read. Continue to love. Continue to find yourself. Call yourself by your own damn name. 

Kevin Sessums was a contributing editor of Vanity Fair  for 14 years, where he wrote 28 cover stories and over 300 articles. He has authored two New York Times  best-selling memoirs, Mississippi Sissy  and I Left It on the Mountain , and is currently the editor and publisher of sessumsMagazine.com.

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Reviews of Find Me by Andre Aciman

Summary | Excerpt | Reading Guide | Discuss | Reviews | Beyond the book | Read-Alikes | Genres & Themes | Author Bio

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• First Published:
• Oct 29, 2019, 272 pages
• Aug 2020, 272 pages

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Book Summary

In this spellbinding exploration of the varieties of love, the author of the worldwide bestseller Call Me by Your Name revisits its complex and beguiling characters decades after their first meeting.

No novel in recent memory has spoken more movingly to contemporary readers about the nature of love than André Aciman's haunting Call Me by Your Name . First published in 2007, it was hailed as "a love letter, an invocation...an exceptionally beautiful book" (Stacey D'Erasmo, The New York Times Book Review ). Nearly three quarters of a million copies have been sold, and the book became a much-loved, Academy Award–winning film starring Timothée Chalamet as the young Elio and Armie Hammer as Oliver, the graduate student with whom he falls in love. In Find Me , Aciman shows us Elio's father, Samuel, on a trip from Florence to Rome to visit Elio, who has become a gifted classical pianist. A chance encounter on the train with a beautiful young woman upends Sami's plans and changes his life forever. Elio soon moves to Paris, where he, too, has a consequential affair, while Oliver, now a New England college professor with a family, suddenly finds himself contemplating a return trip across the Atlantic. Aciman is a master of sensibility, of the intimate details and the emotional nuances that are the substance of passion. Find Me brings us back inside the magic circle of one of our greatest contemporary romances to ask if, in fact, true love ever dies.

Sadly, the publisher was unable to provide us with an excerpt from this book.

Please be aware that this discussion guide will contain spoilers!

• The book begins with a conversation between Miranda and Samuel, who are strangers. What is your first impression of them? What are the similarities and differences in attitudes, beliefs, and experiences that draw them to each other? What are the critical moments in the development of their relationship? Why might Aciman have chosen this opening, given that the story ultimately belongs to Elio and Oliver?
• Who is the "Me" of the book's title? Might there be more than one? What does it mean to be found? How are the themes of love, loss, and loneliness explored in each section?
• Miranda's father is editing a dissertation that contains parables, which he says prove that "life and time are not in sync" and that we all "have many lives." ...

Please be aware that this discussion guide may contain spoilers!

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Can the euphoria of first love ever be recreated? Is it worth sacrificing something sturdy to chase after something fleeting? Was what Elio and Oliver had in Call Me By Your Name any less real simply because it was so brief? Find Me is perhaps more contemplative than its predecessor, but ultimately no less enchanting, and arguably even more affecting. The unhappiness, emotional distance, and unspent desire that these characters must first grapple with in order to attain closure makes the conclusion all the more gratifying... continued

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(Reviewed by Rachel Hullett ).

Beyond the Book

Literary sequels.

2019 has been a year of literary sequels: bestselling authors expanding on fictional worlds they created, in some cases decades after the original book was published. Find Me by André Aciman is one such example, published 12 years after Call Me By Your Name . But it's hardly a new phenomenon—here are some of the most noteworthy literary sequels to have hit the shelves, often to the surprise and delight of readers everywhere.

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Luca Guadagnino’s Oscar-winning 2017 film, Call Me by Your Name --- based on André Aciman’s 2007 novel of the same name --- took the story of Elio and Oliver’s summer of love and turned it into a cultural phenomenon, one of the great romances of our time. The sequel, FIND ME, follows up with the characters who made Aciman a mainstream literary name.

The novel is told in four parts: “Tempo,” which takes place 10 years after the events of the first book; “Cadenza,” which is set five years after “Tempo”; “Capriccio,” which takes place five years after “Cadenza”; and “Da Capo,” the conclusion, occurring not long after that. Each is narrated by a different character from CALL ME BY YOUR NAME.

"Depending on your interpretation of the Acimanverse, the conclusion either muddles or vastly changes the ending of the first book, which was beautiful in its melancholy acceptance of impermanence."

The first is Samuel, Elio’s professor father, who finds a second chance at love and life when he meets a beguiling woman half his age on a train to Rome. The next movement is Elio’s, detailing his relationship with the much older Michel, a rich and generous Parisian who lifts him out of stagnancy and provides the couple with a World War II-era mystery to solve. Finally, we meet Oliver once more at a party in “Capriccio,” where he is a professor ending a sabbatical in New York as he comes to grips with the fact that he torpedoed his life 20 years ago when he left his true love in Italy and married someone else. His is arguably the most interesting section of the book, being the character who has changed the most, albeit not for the better.

Depending on your interpretation of the Acimanverse, the conclusion either muddles or vastly changes the ending of the first book, which was beautiful in its melancholy acceptance of impermanence.

Though not nearly as good a novel, FIND ME is for the CALL ME BY YOUR NAME superfan. Those who have found themselves wishing for different possibilities for Elio and Oliver, or who wants to dive back into this lush, humid world populated by characters whose lives are steeped in wealth, academia and art, will surely enjoy it. Aciman’s love of minutiae and commitment to setting a scene are as present in the sequel as they were in its predecessor --- the number of references to other people’s work that he is able to pack into a relatively short book is astonishing. They make for a richly detailed backdrop if you know what he’s talking about. If you don’t, then at least they provide you with interesting material to Google.

If you’d prefer to keep your experience of the original story pure, that’s completely understandable. However, those looking for more of Aciman’s signature style can still find what they seek in FIND ME.

Reviewed by Alex Bowditch on November 15, 2019

Find Me by André Aciman

• Publication Date: August 4, 2020
• Genres: Fiction
• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Picador
• ISBN-10: 1250758076
• ISBN-13: 9781250758071

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• About the Book

In this spellbinding exploration of the varieties of love, the author of the worldwide bestseller CALL ME BY YOUR NAME revisits its complex and beguiling characters decades after their first meeting.

No novel in recent memory has spoken more movingly to contemporary readers about the nature of love than André Aciman’s haunting CALL ME BY YOUR NAME. First published in 2007, it was hailed as “a love letter, an invocation...an exceptionally beautiful book” (Stacey D’Erasmo, The New York Times Book Review ). Nearly three quarters of a million copies have been sold, and the book became a much-loved, Academy Award–winning film starring Timothée Chalamet as the young Elio and Armie Hammer as Oliver, the graduate student with whom he falls in love.

In FIND ME, Aciman shows us Elio’s father, Samuel, on a trip from Florence to Rome to visit Elio, who has become a gifted classical pianist. A chance encounter on the train with a beautiful young woman upends Sami’s plans and changes his life forever.

Elio soon moves to Paris, where he, too, has a consequential affair, while Oliver, now a New England college professor with a family, suddenly finds himself contemplating a return trip across the Atlantic.

Aciman is a master of sensibility, of the intimate details and the emotional nuances that are the substance of passion. FIND ME brings us back inside the magic circle of one of our greatest contemporary romances to ask if, in fact, true love ever dies.

Find Me by André Aciman

• Publication Date: August 4, 2020
• Genres: Fiction
• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Picador
• ISBN-10: 1250758076
• ISBN-13: 9781250758071

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“Find Me” Is a Shallow Sequel to “Call Me By Your Name”

The novel “ Call Me by Your Name ,” by André Aciman, was published in 2007 and adapted into a movie in 2017. It conjured a swoony romance between two young men, Elio and Oliver, in an Italian seaside town. Then it ended in heartbreak as gentle as the sun slipping beneath the sea. The book established Aciman as a poet of the drunken senses; this magazine described him as an “ acute grammarian of desire .” The film, which grossed 41.9 million dollars at the global box office, seduced both viewers and critics, who declared it “ravishing,” “a lush and vibrant masterpiece.”

Luca Guadagnino, the movie’s director, and Timothée Chalamet, one of its stars, were rumored to be among the many people clamoring for a sequel to the source text. That sequel has arrived, in the form of “ Find Me ,” Aciman’s new novel. The book picks up a decade or so after the main action of “Call Me by Your Name,” with Samuel, Elio’s father, on a train to Rome to visit his son, who has become a classical pianist. En route, Samuel meets a twentysomething woman with whom he conducts an affair. The perspective switches to Elio, who remains haunted by memories of Oliver while pursuing Michel, a lawyer nearly twice his age, and to Oliver, now a professor in the United States, who is throwing a party with his wife and lusting after two guests. Then it’s back to Elio, in a coda that doesn’t so much sink softly under the waves as crash, like a drunk on a scooter, into the beachside ice-cream stand.

The longest section belongs to Samuel and his paramour, Miranda. Miranda is model-gorgeous but dressed carelessly; her demeanor is a mix of wryness, impetuousness, and tenderness. She takes black-and-white photographs and makes forgettable observations that prompt Samuel to marvel at her brilliance. The admiration is mutual. Within twenty-four hours of meeting Samuel, Miranda is sobbing in his bed, entreating him to have her baby (“I want it from you and no one else—even if we never see each other after this weekend”), and offering to tattoo a lighthouse (she calls his penis “my lighthouse”) onto her genitals. Samuel, meanwhile, is a divorced scholar who believes that he has missed his chance at love; he’s quick with what are received, within the world of the book, as acute remarks, unless he’s post-coitally outsourcing his eloquence to the German Romantics. (“ ‘Where did they invent you?’ I said when we were resting. What I meant to say was I didn’t know what life was before this. So I quoted Goethe again.”)

These characters are so unreal—she a wet dream, he a cipher—that any specificity at all becomes embarrassing, as if Aciman were revealing his particular turn-ons. And yet we continue to be served details, often through Miranda’s hero worship. This points to a bigger problem with the book: since all of the narrators are in love and interact mainly with their lovers, the only opinions we ever hear expressed about these people are sweaty and rapturous. The result is a novel that feels besotted with its characters despite scant evidence of their charms. The sex writing itself is unfortunate. If Samuel’s penis is a lighthouse, Miranda’s vagina, we’re told, is a fig. “This is who we’ll be,” Miranda promises, “all cum and juices.” Never has a whirlwind romance felt so interminable.

The second section, about Elio and Michel, reprises the May-December dyad. The two men meet at a classical-music concert and begin to flirt, probe, and speak wistfully about their fathers, who taught them music. Michel’s used to sneak downstairs and play the piano at night; Michel learned to say, in the morning, that he’d dreamed that the piano had played itself. Is this plangent or preposterous? (What person thinks that his family won’t notice him practicing the piano while they’re trying to sleep?) Michel maintains a civil yet distant relationship with his own son, which pains him, because he longs for someone with whom he can reminisce warmly about his dad. But perhaps Elio can fulfill that function. The overlapping male bonds, the echoing motifs—a hand placed on a face, the older lover “holding back”—hint at Aciman’s formal ambition, as he drops hints about “destiny” and the looping nature of time. “Fate,” says Michel, with the book’s characteristic subtlety, “has strange ways of teasing us with patterns.” But it’s hard to appreciate the magic of coincidence when Aciman has lined up all these details himself.

The Oliver section is likewise seeded with defective epiphanies. Oliver finds himself drawn to two party guests, a man and a woman. In fact, he is drawn to the Elio in them; together, they add up to the boy he left behind. (“I couldn’t care a whit about their lives,” he reflects.) As Oliver submits to a fantasy of Elio, of his “impish laugh” and “jeering languor,” Aciman again seems to be positing something like the fungibility of all people who fall outside the bounds of a lover’s narcissism. The book wants to show that people can finish each other’s stories: that Elio might serve as Michel’s estranged son, or that Oliver’s guests might stand in for Elio. This instrumentalization is meant to feel poignant, but it comes off as callous. Consider Samuel and Miranda in their hotel’s breakfast area:

The personnel dressed in white jackets the next morning were busy confabulating and joking with one another while cheesy loud music was playing in the background. “I hate background music and I hate their yapping,” [Miranda] said, indicating the help. She did not hesitate in turning around to one of the waiters. . . . Right away they got quiet. “I’ve grown to hate this hotel,” I said, “but I come here each time I’m in Rome because of the balcony attached to my room. On warm days, I love sitting under the umbrella to read. Later in the evening I have drinks with friends either on my balcony or in the larger terrace upstairs above the third floor. It’s simply heavenly there.”

The scene traps all of “Find Me” in amber. A glimmer of the outside world is shushed to make room for drivel about one’s leisure habits. Aciman relays the reprimanding of the help in the same spirit with which he describes Miranda’s beauty or Samuel’s discernment—that is, as a sign of character. Aciman wants us to approve of his sweethearts so that we can participate in their co-enchantment. This worked in his previous novel. The leads in “Call Me by Your Name” were self-conscious and soulful, but they also scanned as sweet and curious; theirs was the insufferability of youth. Their universality, too, formed part of their appeal: precisely drawn, with delicately shaded interactions, the Elio and Oliver of 2007 made for a convincing portrait of first love. That universality has fled from “Find Me,” which feels alternately too vague, too offensive, and too ridiculous to do anything but place one’s empathic imagination on a rack until one surrenders to one’s own contempt.

Yet it is fellow feeling that these lovers seem to desire above all. Aciman’s characters idealize a state of attunement. “What never ceased to amaze me and cast a halo around our evening was that ever since we’d met, we’d been thinking along the same lines,” Elio says, about Michel. In psychology, attunement, which is sometimes cited as a prerequisite for healthy love, denotes an ability to intuit what the other needs, and to interpret signs in the way that they were intended. The relationships in Aciman’s novel, be they transient or lasting, are marked by an affinity that tends to deepen through conversation, though it requires no words. It is all the more ironic, then, that this reviewer’s experience of “Find Me” was one of such profound disattunement . The book wants to be intimate, profound, but it reads as glib and remote, impervious to actual feeling. Indeed, the text seems not to account for an audience. An apter title would be “Get Lost.”

'Call Me by Your Name' sequel 'Find Me' is lustful, magical but frustrating

Spoiler alert: This post contains plot details of Andre Aciman's "Find Me," the sequel to "Call Me By Your Name." 

Elio may have been the protagonist in André Aciman's 2007 novel "Call Me by Your Name," but in the book's sequel, "fate" is the character you're going to be most invested in. 

"You know, life is not so original after all," one character tells another in "Find Me," (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 261 pp., ★★★ out of four), out Tuesday, Oct. 29. "It has uncanny ways of reminding us that, even without a God, there is a flash of retrospective brilliance in the way fate plays its cards."

Aciman has indeed laid all his cards on the proverbial table, answering questions about some of the original novel's characters (yes, both Elio and Oliver) but deftly dodging others. It’s almost like “Find Me” was the book Aciman really wanted to write all along, but first you needed all the pieces of the puzzle to get there.

Interview: 'A moment of magic': André Aciman talks 'Call Me by Your Name' sequel, 'Find Me'

"Find Me" is the perfect sequel to "Call Me by Your Name" – lustful, introspective and magical – though it is a work that requires readers to suspend disbelief almost to a fault.

'Find Me' doubles down on age gaps in relationships

“Find Me” has everything you loved – and everything that made you cringe – about “Call Me by Your Name."

It fills in its predecessor's gaps. We see characters 10, 15 and 20 years into the future. The themes of "fate" and "time" fly above each story: like doves (romantic entanglements that transcend convention) and like daggers (the reminder that time is often not on our side). But we don’t have only Elio’s voice to rely on this time: We have Sami's and Oliver’s voices, too.

Sami, who we find out has since divorced Elio's mother, meets a woman half his age by chance on a train. Their chemistry grows undeniable. The way he first speaks to her, however – asking her why she looks so "glum" – reads uncomfortably.

One can’t help but cringe when considering this exchange and other moments through a #MeToo-era lens – not to mention that there are no female narrators. This unbalanced power dynamic isn’t fully explored, something Aciman also didn't unpack in the first novel (Elio is 17 and Oliver is 24, controversial in its own right). And the age gaps don't stop there. In the middle of the novel, Elio begins a romance with a man twice his age.

More: 5 books not to miss: Jami Attenberg's 'All This Could Be Yours,' John le Carré spy novel

Aciman’s languid, rhythmic writing does an excellent job distracting you from what might otherwise give you pause; the "Find Me" romances are sensual and gripping. He writes like a cross-country runner: He slows and speeds pacing but never loses sight of the finish line. That question, though, of whether the "Find Me" romances should exist, doesn’t quite go away. 

As with "Call Me by Your Name," "Find Me" also fails to address the HIV/AIDS crisis in any way. The world Aciman has created seems to exist outside of time. It's not that every novel must reflect the state of the world in which its published. But when a work of art is altogether strong, it's that much more frustrating when individual pieces don't quite shine.

Should I read 'Find Me' if I've only seen the 'Call Me by Your Name' movie?

If you’ve only seen the film version of  “Call Me by Your Name,” this book is not for you. The film's ending is, appropriately enough, more cinematic, with Elio crying by the fireplace after finding out Oliver is getting married. It makes sense for the viewer to see Elio grieve a lost love just as his father said he should. The book, however, ends quite differently.

"Find Me" has every bit of romantic tension as “Call Me by Your Name,” but is even more frustrating because all you want is to have Elio and Oliver at least in the same room together (and you don't get that until the final section). In that sense, the book achieves what it’s set out to do: Make you wait 20 years before "finding" that person you’re supposed to be with after all.

Movie review: 'Call Me By Your Name' is a first-love story to savor

For family dysfunction: Family dysfunction is at its finest in Jami Attenberg’s devastating ‘All This Could Be Yours’

Review: Find Me by André Aciman

Written by Kiara Co

Find Me by André Aciman is the sequel to Call Me By Your Name, which published in 2007 and gained more recognition recently because of the 2017 film adaptation that starred Timothée Chalamet as the young Elio and Armie Hammer as Oliver. The film gained significant praise from many people and critics, while also receiving numerous award nominations.

To refresh your minds, the first book is about the story of a sudden and powerful romance that blossoms between an adolescent boy and a summer guest at his parents’ cliff-side mansion on the Italian Riviera. Unprepared for the consequences of their attraction, at first both of them feigns indifference. But during the restless summer weeks that follow, unrelenting buried currents of obsession and fear, and fascination and desire, intensify their passion as they test the charged ground between them. What grows from the depths of their spirits is a romance of scarcely six weeks’ duration and an experience that marks them for a lifetime. For what the two discover on the Riviera and during a sultry evening in Rome is the one thing both already fear they may never truly find again: total intimacy.

In the sequel Find Me , Aciman shows us Elio’s father, Samuel, on a trip from Florence to Rome to visit Elio, who has become a gifted classical pianist. A chance encounter on the train with a beautiful young woman upends Sami’s plans and changes his life forever.

Elio soon moves to Paris, where he, too, has a consequential affair, while Oliver, now a New England college professor with a family, suddenly finds himself contemplating a return trip across the Atlantic. Aciman is a master of sensibility, of the intimate details, and the emotional nuances that are the substance of passion. Find Me brings us back inside the magic circle of one of our greatest contemporary romances to ask if, in fact, true love ever dies.

This novel is from the perspective of Elio’s father, Samuel. It was kind of confusing because in Call Me By Your Name , Samuel already passed away near the end of the novel. So the time period of the novel was hard to keep track of. Having the story mainly on Samuel was kind of disappointing because throughout the story, it felt so bland. Find Me did not feel like a sequel to Call Me By Your Name at all and the book in general felt so plotless. Even the tone of the book wasn’t the same as the previous book, which felt so beautiful and as if you were in the setting of the book. Regardless, Aciman’s writing is still fantastic.

Since the story revolves mostly around Samuel, it didn’t have much Elio and Oliver content in this sequel. Elio was mentioned a bit from the last half of the book while Oliver was barely mentioned until almost at the end of the book. This was quite disappointing because it makes no sense to have this timing before Samuel’s death and barely any characters mentioned from the first book. Both Elio and Oliver interaction only seemed to be mentioned rather than an actual scene.

There were four sections of the book and it was confusing to keep up with exactly what is happening, where, and why as it was kind of inconsistent. The first section is called Tempo, followed by Cadenza, Capriccio, and Da Capo. The book just focused on Samuel’s romances and even when he is going to meet up with Elio, there was barely anything about Elio. The side characters of this book felt so weak because it was so much focused on Samuel.

There are talks of a movie sequel, but as of now, we have no clue how the movie sequel will take place. Will it follow the story of Find Me ? Or will it pick up from the movie version ending of Call Me By Your Name since the ending of the movie was different from the book. The book version was able to fast forward into everybody’s lives, whereas the movie ends off Elio feeling heartbroken after hearing Oliver is going to get married.

If you read Call Me By Your Name and need another book that doesn’t take too long to read, then definitely pick up  Find Me !

Find Me is available from Amazon , Book Depository , and other good book retailers.

Have you read  Find Me ? Tell us in the comments below!

Synopsis | Goodreads

Review: Do No Harm by Christina McDonald

In this spellbinding exploration of the varieties of love, the author of the worldwide bestseller  Call Me by Your Name  revisits its complex and beguiling characters decades after their first meeting.

No novel in recent memory has spoken more movingly to contemporary readers about the nature of love than André Aciman’s haunting  Call Me by Your Name . First published in 2007, it was hailed as “a love letter, an invocation . . . an exceptionally beautiful book” (Stacey D’Erasmo,  The New York Times Book Review ). Nearly three quarters of a million copies have been sold, and the book became a much-loved, Academy Award–winning film starring Timothée Chalamet as the young Elio and Armie Hammer as Oliver, the graduate student with whom he falls in love.

In  Find Me , Aciman shows us Elio’s father, Samuel, on a trip from Florence to Rome to visit Elio, who has become a gifted classical pianist. A chance encounter on the train with a beautiful young woman upends Sami’s plans and changes his life forever.

Elio soon moves to Paris, where he, too, has a consequential affair, while Oliver, now a New England college professor with a family, suddenly finds himself contemplating a return trip across the Atlantic.

Aciman is a master of sensibility, of the intimate details and the emotional nuances that are the substance of passion.  Find Me  brings us back inside the magic circle of one of our greatest contemporary romances to ask if, in fact, true love ever dies.

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by Alafair Burke ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 11, 2022

For those who like a tricky brain teaser and aren't too picky about interesting characters or emotional realism.

A mystery featuring a woman with amnesia in New Jersey, a drowned fishing guide on Long Island, a 15-year-old cold case in Wichita, and much more.

In her 19th mystery, and the sixth to feature detective Ellie Hatcher, Burke has taken the kitchen-sink approach, offering a rare abundance of characters, crimes, and misdemeanors. As much as there is a protagonist, it is a woman who, years ago, was thrown from an SUV in Hopewell, New Jersey, and lost her memory. Hope Miller, as she is now known, has spent the past decade and a half under the wing of a devoted friend she met after the accident, an attorney named Lindsay who lives with a boyfriend named Scott. But as the story opens, Hope has disappeared from Hopewell without leaving Lindsay any information as to her whereabouts. Since she has no legal identity, Hope has to work under the radar; she finds a job staging properties on the East End of Long Island for a sketchy real estate agent named...oh well, turns out he's not that important. Meanwhile, there's Ellie Hatcher, the detective whose series this is. She's on vacation in St. Barth's with her boyfriend, Max, having bad dreams about her dad, a cop who committed suicide because he couldn't find Wichita's College Hill Strangler, who was later arrested and jailed. Then there's this giant home improvement chain also based in Wichita whose female CEO is running for senator...and wait, there's more! This novel seems more like the work of a beginning crime writer than one with Burke's experience. Clues, red herrings, exposition, and "things you should know" are dropped in awkwardly and obviously: "Lindsay had learned that psychological trauma or post-traumatic stress disorder could also induce dissociative fugue, or what used to be called a fugue state—a psychological condition characterized by an inability to recall one’s identity or personality." All this hand-holding aside, the book operates on what feels like a kind of anti–Occam's-razor logic, favoring the most complicated solution to any question. The good news is, there is one.

Pub Date: Jan. 11, 2022

ISBN: 978-0-06-285-336-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: Nov. 1, 2021

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2021

SUSPENSE | THRILLER | SUSPENSE | PSYCHOLOGICAL THRILLER | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | GENERAL FICTION

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WORST CASE SCENARIO

by T.J. Newman ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 13, 2024

A chilling tale of disaster, bravery, and sacrifice.

One disaster triggers another in a cascade of perils.

A commercial pilot suffers a widow-maker heart attack at 35,000 feet over Minnesota with almost 300 passengers and crew aboard. The copilot is trapped in the lavatory. A flight attendant struggles hopelessly with the controls as the jet noses downward. There will be no miracles. The first two chapters of Newman's latest are the most frightening imaginable, with everything that could possibly go wrong going wrong. The plane clips a power line and shatters, with the largest piece hitting the Clover Hill nuclear power plant. The impact cracks a wall in a building containing water that cools spent fuel rods. If those rods overheat, radiation flowing into the adjacent Mississippi could turn the river basin into a dead zone all the way down to the Gulf of Mexico. Primary electrical distribution is severed. Debris blocks roads. A flaming wing crushes a family’s car. The novel is aptly named but for the lack of a plural: This string of worst-case scenarios is expertly designed to scare the bejesus out of us. And yet it all seems plausible. Luckily, there are heroes, but the reader had best not get emotionally invested in all of them, as they pay a heavy price. Meanwhile, the pool is losing water that could cause a fuel rod fire and an “uncontrollable spread of invisible, toxic, cancer-causing particulates” that would be “in everything we touched, ate, drank, and breathed, for…for forever.” The accident may have massive global implications, and the clock is ticking. “Nuclear waste is toxic for millennia,” a scientist warns the U.S. president. So brace yourselves, readers. This one is frightening.

Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2024

ISBN: 9780316576796

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Little, Brown

Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2024

SUSPENSE | SUSPENSE | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE

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by Michael Crichton & James Patterson ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 3, 2024

Red-hot storytelling.

Two master storytellers create one explosive thriller.

Mauna Loa is going to blow within days—“the biggest damn eruption in a century”—and John “Mac” MacGregor of the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory leads a team trying to fend off catastrophe. Can they vent the volcano? Divert the flow of blistering hot lava? The city of Hilo is but a few miles down the hill from the world’s largest active volcano and will likely be in the path of a 15-foot-high wall of molten menace racing toward them at 50 miles an hour. “You live here, you always worry about the big one,” Mac says, and this could be it. There’s much more, though. The U.S. Army swoops in, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff personally “drafts” Mac into the Army. Then Mac learns the frightening secret of the Army’s special interest in Mauna Loa, and suddenly the stakes fly far, far beyond Hilo. Perhaps they can save the world, but the odds don’t look good. Readers will sympathize with Mac, who teaches surfing to troubled teens and for whom “taking chances is part of his damned genetic code.” But no one takes chances like the aerial cowboy Jake Rogers and the photographer who hires him to fly over the smoldering, burbling, rock-spitting hellhole. Some of the action scenes will make readers’ eyes pop as the tension continues to build. As with any good thriller, there’s a body count, but not all thrillers have blackened corpses surfing lava flows. The story is the brainchild of the late Crichton, who did a great deal of research but died in 2008 before he could finish the novel. His widow handed the project to James Patterson, who weaves Crichton’s work into a seamless summer read.

Pub Date: June 3, 2024

ISBN: 9780316565073

Page Count: 432

Review Posted Online: June 20, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024

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HABEN: The Deafblind Woman Who Conquered Harvard Law, by Haben Girma. (Twelve, 288 pp., $16.99.) In this inspiring memoir, Girma recounts her Eritrean-American childhood, her parents’ harrowing refugee experience, her triumph as the first deafblind graduate of Harvard Law School and her career as an advocate fighting for people with disabilities. Along the way, she helps build a school in Mali, develops an innovative text-to-braille communication system, climbs an iceberg in Alaska and meets with President Obama at the White House.

FIND ME, by André Aciman. (Picador, 272 pp., $17.) The long-awaited sequel to Aciman’s 2007 novel, “Call Me by Your Name,” picks up the story of Elio and Oliver — played by Timothée Chalamet and Armie Hammer in the Oscar-nominated film — 15 years later.

SWIFT: New and Selected Poems, by David Baker. (Norton, 208 pp., $15.95.) These autobiographical poems are arranged in reverse chronological order, a choice our reviewer, Eric McHenry, found “curiously affecting”: “Parents die and then decline. A marriage ends, then flourishes. A child grows younger. ... It’s as though the book’s structure were another protest against time’s passage and the world’s degradation.”

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THE REVISIONERS, by Margaret Wilkerson Sexton. (Counterpoint, 288 pp., $16.95.) This novel that our reviewer, Stephanie Powell Watts, called “stunning” — narrated in alternating chapters by two Black women experiencing racism a century apart — won the NAACP Image Award.

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Book details

Author: André Aciman

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A New York Times Bestseller In this spellbinding exploration of the varieties of love, the author of the worldwide bestseller Call Me by Your Name ...

Book Details

A New York Times Bestseller In this spellbinding exploration of the varieties of love, the author of the worldwide bestseller Call Me by Your Name revisits its complex and beguiling characters decades after their first meeting. No novel in recent memory has spoken more movingly to contemporary readers about the nature of love than André Aciman’s haunting Call Me by Your Name . First published in 2007, it was hailed as “a love letter, an invocation . . . an exceptionally beautiful book” (Stacey D’Erasmo, The New York Times Book Review ). Nearly three quarters of a million copies have been sold, and the book became a much-loved, Academy Award–winning film starring Timothée Chalamet as the young Elio and Armie Hammer as Oliver, the graduate student with whom he falls in love. In Find Me , Aciman shows us Elio’s father, Samuel, on a trip from Florence to Rome to visit Elio, who has become a gifted classical pianist. A chance encounter on the train with a beautiful young woman upends Sami’s plans and changes his life forever. Elio soon moves to Paris, where he, too, has a consequential affair, while Oliver, now a New England college professor with a family, suddenly finds himself contemplating a return trip across the Atlantic. Aciman is a master of sensibility, of the intimate details and the emotional nuances that are the substance of passion. Find Me brings us back inside the magic circle of one of our greatest contemporary romances to ask if, in fact, true love ever dies.

Imprint Publisher

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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Reading Guide

Reading Guides for Find Me

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Named an Goodreads, TIME and Vogue Best Book of 2019 Named one of the most anticipated Fall books by ABC News Online, Associated Press, Bustle , Buzzfeed , Canadian Broadcast Corporation, Chicago Tribune , Entertainment Weekly , Goodreads, Huffington Post , Hypable , Lit Hub, Marie Claire , Medium , The Millions , NewNowNext, New York Magazine , Nylon , NY Post , Observer , Oprah.com, Parade , Philadelphia Inquirer , Publishers Weekly , Thrillist , TIME , The Times (UK), Town & Country , Washington Blade , Washington Post , Woman’s Day , Yahoo , Vogue , Vox , Vultur e , USA Today "Dazzling" —Parul Sehgal of The New York Times Book Review at the 92nd St Y "Aciman’s quiet, label-free presentation of bisexual life represents a minor triumph . . . Likewise, his refusal to offer easy resolution, which infuses the whole romantic enterprise with a kind of delicious melancholy. There are moments, particularly in the final chapter, that may have readers gazing tearfully into their fireplaces, real or imaginary, just like Timothée Chalamet at the end of Luca Guadagnino’s superlative film of 'Call Me by Your Name.'" —Charles Arrowsmith, The Washington Post “[ Find Me ] is a lyrical meditation on being forced to move to another location after the party’s over, on the Sisyphean task of trying to replicate the magic of young passion . . . it strikes an affectingly melancholy chord.” —Josh Duboff, The New York Times Book Review "You don’t have to have read Call Me by Your Name, Aciman’s 2007 bestselling novel turned Oscar-nominated movie, to immediately fall in love with this sexy, melancholic follow-up. It stands entirely separate, yet connected, a beautiful ode to the passage of time, to the lasting power of true love and the ache of loneliness . . . the revelations about who these characters have become unraveling slowly like a gorgeous piece of classical music." — Buzzfeed “ Call Me By Your Name was widely praised for its treatment of the nature of love, a theme that Find Me continues with subtlety and grace. Its treatment of the characters’ psychology is astute and insightful, but what will ultimately drive reader interest is the question of whether star-crossed lovers Elio and Oliver will reunite. One can only hope.” — Booklist ( Starred Review) "Love in all its sublime iterations is at the heart of Aciman’s incandescent sequel to the acclaimed Call Me by Your Name . . . Aciman gifts readers with a beautiful 21st-century romance that reflects on the remembrance of things past and the courage to embrace the future. — Library Journal ( Starred Review) “With all of the richly painted details, emotional nuance, and deeply affecting romance as the first installment, this book will draw you in and make you believe in love again.” — Good Housekeeping “Aciman writes about desire with blunt honesty, describing erotic and emotional interactions with equal clarity. Sex can be tender or not, the connection lasting or ephemeral, but it is almost always multilayered and complex.” —Clea Simon, Boston Globe “The sequel is just as maddeningly seductive as the original.” — ELLE “Elegant . . . Elio is the heart of the novel, as its core themes—including fatherhood, music, the nature of time and fate, the weight and promise of the past—are infused with eroticism, nostalgia and tenderness in fluid prose. The novel again demonstrates Aciman’s capacity to fuse the sensual and the cerebral in stories that touch the heart.” — Publishers Weekly “[ Find Me ] is touching without being sentimental . . . An elegant, memorable story of enduring love across the generations.” — Kirkus Reviews “Soulful”— People Magazine “The focus of Find Me is the unlived life, the real life that comes to a standstill . . . Aciman's clever arrangement takes advantage of the frustrated desire of the reader to see Elio and Oliver reunited . . . Far more ambitious than Call Me by Your Name . . . great care has gone into the artistic shaping of this narrative.”—Anne Serre, The Times Literary Supplement "A structural marvel . . . proves itself indispensable to longtime readers and newcomers alike."—Garrett Biggs, The Chicago Review of Books " Find Me is a sensual delight . . . Throughout his nonfiction and fiction, Aciman has maintained a profound preoccupation with memory and the responsibility of history. An aching sense of vulnerability and fearlessness drives this book past any question of whether or not a sequel was warranted." —Lauren LeBlanc, Observer “ Find Me is written in the same spiraling prose . . . full of grace, with some sentences approaching page length—that Call Me by Your Name was. I devoured the novel quickly, and on rereading have found myself unable to break away from Aciman’s hypnotic rhythms.”—Spencer Kornhaber, The Atlantic “I’m relishing this indulgent sequel—sex, sculptures, food, villas: everything a person could want from a novel or from life.” —Richie Hoffman, Poetry Foundation “Exquisite”—Kate Erbland, IndieWire " Aciman had his work cut out for himself in crafting a sequel as contemplative and gorgeous as Call Me by Your Name , which ended in its own coda of Elio's and Oliver's paths crossing years and years hence. Threading that needle perfectly, Aciman continues his story, parsing its very structure in his erudite, knowing style . . . Aciman's genius holds true and makes Find Me a splendid work in its own right." —Dave Wheeler, Shelf Awareness (Starred Review) “Stubbornly unsentimental, but nevertheless beautiful . . . Find Me is, at heart, a meditation on how love bends and warps over time, but never quite disappears.”—Kristin Iversen, Nylon " This [book] functioned like a medical-grade SAD lamp in the dead of February. It is a lively novel about sentimental Americans in Italy who feel a wider range of emotions in seven minutes than most people do in a month." —Molly Young, Vulture “A devastatingly honest reflection on the authenticity of love and life . . . Find Me is a truly remarkable achievement of love beyond the honeymoon teenage years.”— Tomás Guerrero Jaramillo, Harvard Crimson

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