Roman Year

A Memoir

By: André Aciman

Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini

Length: 11 hrs and 45 mins

Publisher's summary

"Narrator Edoardo Ballerini immerses listeners in a lost world with this memoir."—AudioFile on Out of Egypt (Earphones Award winner)

André Aciman, the author of Call Me by Your Name returns with a deeply romantic memoir of his time in Rome while on the cusp of adulthood. Aciman says, "Edoardo Ballerini reads my books exceptionally well. He gets my pacing, the inflections of muted irony, the anxiety of loss, the search for meaning that my prose on paper isn’t always able to convey—he gets it all. He gets me. A writer couldn't be luckier."

In Roman Year, André Aciman captures the period of his adolescence that began when he and his family first set foot in Rome, after being expelled from Egypt. Though Aciman’s family had been well-off in Alexandria, all vestiges of their status vanished when they fled, and the author, his younger brother, and his deaf mother moved into a rented apartment in Rome’s Via Clelia. Though dejected, Aciman’s mother and brother found their way into life in Rome, while Aciman, still unmoored, burrowed into his bedroom to read one book after the other. The world of novels eventually allowed him to open up to the city and, through them, discover the beating heart of the Eternal City.

Aciman’s time in Rome did not last long before he and his family moved across the ocean, but by the time they did, he was leaving behind a city he loved. In this memoir, the author, a genius of "the poetry of the place" (John Domini, The Boston Globe), conjures the sights, smells, tastes, and people of Rome as only he can. Aciman captures, as if in amber, a living portrait of himself on the brink of adulthood and the city he worshipped at that pivotal moment. Roman Year is a treasure, unearthed by one of our greatest prose stylists.

A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

©2024 André Aciman (P)2024 Macmillan Audio

Critic reviews

"In rapturous prose, Aciman captures the shocks of beauty he experienced . . . during what amounted to a brief interlude on his way to the U.S. His poetic exploration of place and probing of what constitutes a home makes for exquisitely moving reading."—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Fans of André Aciman’s novel Call Me by Your Name will swoon for this vivid, heartfelt account of the time he spent as a teenager in Rome . . . A standout memoir from a master of emotional nuance who always reminds us to 'look for the human.'"—Jessica Olin, Oprah Daily