The Idiot Elif Batuman

Jo says:
Set in the nineties, just at the dawn of email, this is a soulful and funny semi-autobiographical story of Selin, a Turkish American linguistics and literature student in her first year at university, navigating the perplexities of adulthood through language and its pitfalls to connection. As Selin befriends Svetlana, a and obsesses over Ivan, an older Hungarian student in her Russian class, they exchange emails and the gap between an email relationship and a real-life relationship is brilliantly described, as is the baffling gap between reality and expectation as a person forges their selfhood.