Nymph: A Novel

Call Me by Your Name meets Elena Ferrante in this debut coming-of-age novel about a young girl who spends summers working at her family’s timeworn Italian agriturismo, the tragedy that rends her life into “before” and “after,” and the unexpected consequences of her romance with an American girl.

When we meet ten-year-old Leo, life is a myth to inhabit, a series of objects to collect. She spends her summer mornings tidying the rooms of her Nonna Tina’s Italian agriturismo, carefully accumulating the curious bits of detritus left by the guests—a pearl earring, a lock of hair. At night she hangs onto her father's every word as he holds court with liquor-spun tales of Odysseus and the Trojans in secret battle.

Years later, we meet her once again during a sweltering summer not unlike the many that have come before. And yet, the agriturismo is the only thing that remains the same: Nonna Tina has grown older, Leo’s brother Max is intractable and mercurial, and the curiosity Leo so loved to feed as a child has turned into something more confusing. A tragedy has transformed the world into a thing she doesn't recognize or understand; an essential person is missing.

But then a new one arrives. Dolores, an American girl a few years older than Leo, comes to work in the hotel, bringing with her an openness, sharp-hewn beauty, and crystalline confidence Leo cannot turn away from. Over the course of this sun-drenched summer in the northern Italian countryside, Leo's world is tilted off its axis once again.

Rarely has a debut novel captured the exquisite pain and exhilaration of first love so potently—that time when one is trying so hard to hold on to what is elusive, to deny what cannot be faced, to say what cannot be said. Sensuous and precise, searching and knowing, Nymph introduces a young writer of extraordinary talent, and will sit on the shelf alongside sultry summer classics such as Call Me by Your Name, The Lost Daughter, and Bonjour Tristesse.