Andre Aciman · 2019 · exile

The sequel to Call Me By Your Name, built like a sonata in four movements - Tempo, Cadenza, Capriccio, Da Capo - each in a different city and a different decade. Elio's father meets a woman on a train to Rome; Elio falls for a man twice his age in Paris; Oliver reconsiders everything in New York. Then Da Capo, which means from the beginning.

1. 1
   Florence

   Tempo, ten years after that summer. Samuel Perlman gets on a train to visit his son, divorced and going through the motions of a life - and Aciman gives half the novel to a man most readers opened the book hoping to skip past.

2. 2
   Rome

   The train arrives and Samuel does not part from Miranda, the young woman he has spent three hours talking to - and the two of them stay, in a city Elio is now teaching and performing in, and it changes the rest of his short life.

3. 3
   Paris

   Cadenza, fifteen years after. Elio, a pianist, is invited to dinner after a church concert by a lawyer called Michel who is twice his age - and the age gap of the first novel is quietly run in reverse.

4. 4
   New York

   Capriccio, twenty years after. A farewell party marking the end of Oliver's time as a visiting academic, with a wife, two sons and a quiet New England college to go back to - and a man deciding not to go quietly.

5. 5
   New Hampshire

   The life he is going back to, and the one he does not go back to - the novel's real subject being people who have spent decades not in sync with their own lives and are running out of time to be.

6. 6
   B.

   Da Capo, which means from the beginning. Oliver returns to the villa on the Italian Riviera, and the last section picks up directly where the first novel's last page left off - which is the only ending Aciman could have written.