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9 absorbing novels with an academic setting

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Best books to help you deal with imposter syndrome

The Idiot

The ingenious, hilarious new novel from award-winning writer Elif Batuman - 'It’s a novel about being young and stupid that’s both wise and clever — and it’s a treat' Evening Standard

Discover TikTok's new favourite book. 
 
'I loved it and could have read a thousand more pages of it' Emma Cline, author of The Girls 
 
 Selin, a tall, highly strung Turkish-American from New Jersey turns up at Harvard with no idea what to expect. What she doesn't expect is: 
 
 - How much time she will spend thinking about language and its limitations 
 - An opinionated cosmopolitan Serb named Svetlana, who will become her confidante 
 - A mathematician from Hungary called Ivan, whom she will obsess over when she is supposed to be studying 
 - Feeling dangerously overwhelmed by the challenges and possibilities of adulthood 
 
 But most of all, Selin does not expect to embark on a study of precisely how baffling love can be when you are trying to forge a self... 
 _______________- 
 
 PRAISE FOR THE IDIOT: 
 'A moving, continent-hopping coming-of-age story' Observer 
 'Elif Batuman surely has one of the best senses of humour...refreshing and unique' Sheila Heti 
 'Full of zingy one-liners' Financial Times 
 'Hilarious, brilliant observations about writing, life and crushes' Curtis Sittenfeld 
 'Delightful and slyly funny' Red

I loved it and could have read a thousand more pages of it. It presented this almost moment-by-moment experience of life, in a way that I just felt Batuman had so much control. There’s so much wit and pleasure in her writing you feel very comfortable being in the world she’s created.

Elif Batuman is a writer whose byline creates a flutter of anticipation… If a dominant mode of her generation is knowing introspection, she writes with a bewildered outrospection that delights in the bathetic and the absurd… It’s a novel about being young and stupid that’s both wise and clever — and it’s a treat.

Elif Batuman surely has one of the best senses of humour in American letters. The pleasure she takes in observing the eccentricities of each of her characters makes for a really refreshing and unique bildungsroman; one more fascinated with what's going on around and outside the bewildered protagonist, than what s going on inside her.

Sheila Heti, author of HOW SHOULD A PERSON BE? and TICKNOR

Each paragraph is a small anthology of well-made observations… Batuman has a rich sense of the details of human attachment and lust.

Beautifully written... a wry, funny coming-of-age story set at the dawn of email among a group of Harvard brainiacs too nerdy and self-involved to even think about sex, drugs and drinking.

[A] masterfully funny debut novel… Erudite but never pretentious, The Idiot will make you crave more books by Batuman.

Not since Don Quixote has a quest for love gone so hilariously and poignantly awry. In spare, unforgettable prose, Batuman the traveller (to Harvard, to mysterious Hungary) recreates for the reader the psychic state of being a child entering language. We marvel and tremble with her at the impossibility and mysterious necessity for human connection that both makes life worthwhile and yet so often strands us all in torment. This book is a bold, unforgettable, un-put-downable read by a new master stylist. Best novel I've read in years.

Mary Karr, author of THE ART OF MEMOIR and IT CHOOSES YOU

A moving, continent-hopping coming-of-age story.

Often wonderful, frequently hilarious… full of zingy one-liners and arch, deflationary observations about the absurdities of academia and adolescence…

I'm not Turkish, I don't have a Serbian best friend, I'm not in love with a Hungarian, I don't go to Harvard. Or do I? For one wonderful week, I got to be this worldly and brilliant, this young and clumsy and in love. The Idiot is a hilariously mundane immersion into a world that has never before received the 19th Century Novel treatment. An addictive, sprawling epic; I wolfed it down.

Miranda July, author of THE FIRST BAD MAN and IT CHOOSES YOU

Self-aware, cerebral, and delightful.

Elif Batuman's novel not only captures the storms and mysteries and comedies of youth but, in its wonderfully sensitive portrait of a young woman adventuring across languages and cultures, it brilliantly draws to our attention a modern politics of friendship. This is a remarkable book.

Joseph O'Neill, author of THE DOG and NETHERLAND

Rambling, ramshackle, erudite; full of careless charm… Her jokes are one of this book’s great joys.

There are very few things in life that are better than finding a novel that takes you somewhere you’ve never been, and reveals a world that you know nothing about: and that’s what lives at the heart of The Idiot. Fresh, fascinating and filled with details that are impossibly foreign and intricately fascinating, it’s a must-read for everyone looking to step outside their own lives for a little while and learn something about the experience of someone else coming into their own in such a difficult world.

Batuman’s brainy novel is leavened with humor and a heroine incapable of artifice.

The Idiot is a baffling, if brilliant, first novel.

[A] witty, smart and endlessly-entertaining coming-of-age story.

The Idiot is an affectionate portrait of first love in all its bumbling haplessness, and a playful celebration of the power and limitations of language.

Very funny indeed. The Idiot is the richly observant story of [Selin's] unique and eccentric coming of age.

Generously capacious… The triumph of Batuman’s book is to make this period of youth matter.

You know when you love someone but they don’t love you back?... It’s a feeling so expertly drawn in The Idiot that you may well start to get flashbacks of your own unrequited tristes… The Idiot is beautiful in every passage, in every turn of the phrase, and full of wry observations that make you feel as if you’ve never really seen the world.

Batuman captures the amplified, airless banality of the 1990s with flip sentences… Light-hearted but of high quality, it falls into the loafing abroad, goofing and self-knowing genre.

The whole novel is full of hilarious, brilliant observations about writing, life and crushes.

One of the funniest and most inventive youngish writers of non-fiction in America… Selin’s meandering observations and gentle humour make her an engaging narrator… Batuman examines complex subjects with an appealing lightness of touch… The scene when Selin leaves the Hungarian village is surprisingly moving and encapsulates the overall effect of a novel which reminds us that dead time can be full of life.

Sweetly funny, The Idiot rejects the doctrine of omitting needless words in favour of marvelling…at the complexities of language and communication.

Charming… A gentle coming-of-age novel drawing on Batuman’s time at Harvard in the mid-1990s… It’s in such acute portrayals of early adulthood’s uncertainties that this pleasantly rambling tale leaves its most vivid impression.

A delightfully digressive campus novel.

There is more than one idiot in this delightful and slyly funny coming-of-age novel... Will strike a chord for any former fresher who felt the same way. (That would be all of us.)

Batuman, in seemingly writing a novel about nothing, has produced an incredibly complex, accurate and funny novel.

I never want to finish it, so I’m reading it very slowly.

Every page is thicketed with jokes, riffs, theories of language. It’s a portrait of an intellectual and sentimental education that offers almost unseemly pleasure.

Elif Batuman is a real writer, and should be allowed to write whatever the hell she likes.

Selin’s deadpan narration is often very funny indeed

This is a capacious book that creates an alternative world

At once clever and clueless, Batuman’s heroine shows us with just how messy it can be to forge a self

One of the best novels I read all summer... a painstakingly accurate depiction of the balancing act that is student-life. As clever as it is funny, Batuman's debut novel allows us to laugh at our own stupidity, and celebrate our own cluelessness.

The Idiot... manages the trick of being laugh-out-loud funny while not actually being a comedy. It just observers life, in all its truth and is hilarious for page after page.

I finally read The Idiot by Elif Batuman and everyone is correct, she is clearly a genius

'I loved it and could have read a thousand more pages of it' Emma Cline, author of The Girls 
 
**SHORTLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2018** 
 
 Selin, a tall, highly strung Turkish-American from New Jersey turns up at Harvard with no idea what to expect. What she doesn't expect is: 
 
- How much time she will spend thinking about language and its limitations 
- An opinionated cosmopolitan Serb named Svetlana, who will become her confidante 
- A mathematician from Hungary called Ivan, whom she will obsess over when she is supposed to be studying 
- Feeling dangerously overwhelmed by the challenges and possibilities of adulthood 
 
But most of all, Selin does not expect to embark on a study of precisely how baffling love can be when you are trying to forge a self... 
_______________- 
 
PRAISE FOR THE IDIOT: 
'A moving, continent-hopping coming-of-age story' Observer 
'Elif Batuman surely has one of the best senses of humour...refreshing and unique' Sheila Heti 
'Full of zingy one-liners' Financial Times 
'Hilarious, brilliant observations about writing, life and crushes' Curtis Sittenfeld 
'Delightful and slyly funny' Red

Elif Batuman

Our funniest overthinker - and the queen of the campus novel... Selin is a droll and disarming narrator, and takes her place as one of the finest hapless scholars in the literary canon.

Batuman has a gift for making the universe seem, somehow, like the benevolent and witty literary seminar you wish it were . . . This novel wins you over in a million micro-observations.

A richly suggestive and amusing book.

Either/Or is both an entertaining campus novel and an engaging disquisition on the very nature and purpose of novels.

Stupendous . . . hilarious... Batuman is a genius, rendering human folly at its most colorful and borderline surreal

The central pleasure of reading Elif Batuman's ferociously intelligent fiction...[is] the thrill of encountering things you already half-knew, rendered in language with lyrical precision... hopefully, there will be a third installment of the adventures of Elif Batuman's brilliantly modern picaro.

Wonderfully idiosyncratic... Charming

Delightful... Batuman has a formidable deadpan wit... Selin is not only an astute observer but displays a touching capacity for awe.

A charming, mordantly funny follow-up to her first novel... triumphal.

Either/Or is an astute and very amusing read, packed with pin-sharp observations delivered in a deadpan style.

Selin, the magnetic protagonist in Batuman's brilliant and comedic first novel, The Idiot (2017), returns . . . Selin reads and ponders the human condition, culminating in a breath-catching ending that will leave spellbound readers hoping for more from Batuman's bright and witty adventurer of conscience.

[A] charming, smart and completely idiosyncratic take on art, life and the gap between.

One of the most convincing fictional descriptions of overwhelming despair I have read... Batuman... [has] extraordinary control of the narrative voice.

Effervescent . . . Observant, defiant, and newly on antidepressants, Selin approaches the mystery of human relations with a beginner's naivete and sharp intelligence . . . Batuman's light touch and humor are brought to bear on serious questions . . . As accomplished as The Idiot was, this improves upon it, and Batuman's already sharp chops as a novelist come across as even more refined in these pages. Readers will be enraptured.

A brilliant meditation on womanhood and identity. By turns hilarious and illuminating.

What elevates this far above the typical campus novel is Ms. Batuman's wry perspective . . . Selin's observations are frequently hilarious, sometimes touching and always original . . . There's both a sweet innocence and a sophisticated meta aspect to all this, a level on which Either/Or is about how Selin (and her creator) came to create the very book we're reading . . . [A] charming, hyper-literary novel . . . To be continued, we hope.

Batuman, a Pulitzer Prize finalist and New Yorker writer, brings delicious detail and light irony to her heroine's quest.

Oprah Daily, “The 50 Most Anticipated Books of 2022”

Either/Or is driven by intellectual questions: it's a novel of ideas narrated by a protagonist who, even in her misery, is delightful company.

Elif Batuman's debut novel, The Idiot, is one of the best works of fiction published in the 21st century. Her new novel, Either/Or, picks up where The Idiot left off. . . . Batuman has an extremely keen sense for what makes characters engaging and renders it all in supernaturally observant and funny prose.

AV Club, “The 15 most-anticipated books of 2022”

Selin is a disarming narrator, tossing off insights that are revelatory, moving, and laugh-out-loud funny - sometimes all at once - and it's exciting to watch her become the author of her own story. Another delightfully cerebral and bighearted novel from a distinctive voice in contemporary fiction.

In 2018, Elif Batuman's witty campus novel, The Idiot, was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize. . . . Now, Batuman returns with a sequel, Either/Or, that picks up during Selin's just-as-messy sophomore year. Expect a master course in snappy social observation.

TIME, 'The 21 Most Anticipated Books of 2022'

Batuman's latest picks up where her deeply enjoyable 2017 novel The Idiot left off, with Selin now a sophomore at Harvard, trying to untangle all that has happened, and all that could. Besides, Kierkegaard/Elliott Smith vibes will always bring me to the table.

LitHub, “Most Anticipated Books of 2022”

[A] much-anticipated sequel. Either/Or takes places in 1996 and follows Selin throughout her sophomore year as she attempts to make sense of everything that happened the summer before.

Nylon, “24 Books We’re Looking Forward to in 2022”

Compelling, with witty, hilarious observations on life.

[A] charming and witty new story... We follow Selin...as she navigates the next chapter of her life with hilarious results.

Superb... Either/Or is a smart and highly amusing book, the third by American Turkish author Batuman, firmly establishing her as great new contemporary literary talent.

Surely to be a classic of the genre... [An] impressive feat of being both searingly smart and funny

Batuman has taken what made The Idiot so brilliant, distilled it, and created an equally brilliant new work. Either/Or is unbridled joy.

Funny... Unforgettable... Batuman is particularly good on sex and sexual politics... The star feature is the narration... garrulous, rambunctious... full of baroque riffs and digressions.

A fresh voice is a rare thing, and Elif Batuman is one such.

Times Literary Supplement, *Books of the Year*

Either/Or is extremely funny and delightfully ludic, as it probes the very act of reading from the point of view of confused university student Selin.

Anakana Schofield, Irish Times, Books of the Year 2022

I was desperately looking forward to Elif Batuman's Either/Or, and it more than lived up to it.

Re-encountering Selin...felt like being reunited with an old friend.

I greatly enjoyed the comic zing of Elif Batuman's delightful Either/Or

Witty, intelligent and funny... [Selin's] inner monologue is addictive enough to read a thousand more pages of, and I can only cross my fingers that this isn't the last instalment of the series.

Just as funny and self-aware and clever as The Idiot.

Laugh out loud…hilarious and thoughtful

The new novel from the bestselling author of The Idiot follows one young woman's quest for self-knowledge, as she travels abroad and tests the limits of her newfound adulthood. 
 
'Elif Batuman is the queen of the campus novel... Enchanting' Sunday Times 
 
SELIN IS THE LUCKIEST PERSON IN HER FAMILY: 
 
The only one who was born in America and got to go to Harvard. Now it's her second year, and Selin knows she has to make it count. The first order of business: to figure out the meaning of everything that happened over the summer... 
 
On the plus side, her life feels like the plot of an exciting novel. On the other hand, why do so many novels have crazy, abandoned women in them? And how does one live a life as interesting as a novel - a life worthy of becoming a novel - without turning into a crazy, abandoned woman oneself? 
 
'Stupendous... Hilarious... Batuman is a genius' Vogue 
 
'This novel wins you over in a million micro-observations' New York Times 
 
'Searingly smart' Evening Standard

Elif Batuman

Books by Elif Batuman

Articles featuring Elif Batuman

9 absorbing novels with an academic setting

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