Call Me by Your Name

In the summer of 1983, on the Italian Riviera, seventeen-year-old Elio Perlman spends his days transcribing music, reading, and swimming at his family's seaside villa. Each year his father, a professor, hosts a young scholar to help with academic work, and this summer's guest is Oliver — a confident, twenty-four-year-old American whose easy charm both unsettles and magnetizes Elio. Over six weeks of heat, longing, and hesitation, an intense and secret intimacy grows between them.

André Aciman's acclaimed 2007 novel is narrated by Elio years later, recalling that summer in exacting, sensuous detail: the games of proximity and denial, the electricity of a first great love, and the ache of knowing it must end. The final section leaps forward across the two decades that follow, tracing how a brief affair can shape an entire life.

Lush, introspective, and unabashedly romantic, Call Me by Your Name is a meditation on desire, memory, and identity — the book that inspired Luca Guadagnino's award-winning film and that has become a touchstone of contemporary LGBTQ+ literature. It is the first of two books, followed by the sequel Find Me.