Harvard Square
by André Aciman
A powerful tale of love, friendship, and becoming American in late ’70s Cambridge from the best-selling novelist.
"If you like brave, acute, elated, naked, brutal, tender, humane, and beautiful prose, then you’ve come to the right place.”—Nicole Krauss
Cambridge, 1977: A Harvard graduate student, a Jew from Egypt, is preparing to become the assimilated American professor he longs to be. But when he bonds with a brash, charismatic Arab cab driver nicknamed Kalashnikov, he begins to neglect his studies. Together they carouse the bars and cafés of Cambridge, seduce strangers, ridicule “jumbo-ersatz” America, and skinny-dip in Walden Pond. As final exams approach and the cab driver is threatened with deportation, the grad student faces the decision of his life: whether to cling to his dream of New World assimilation or ditch it all to defend his Old World friend.
Sexually charged and enormously moving, this is a deeply American novel of identity and ideals in conflict. It is the book that will seal André Aciman’s reputation as one of the finest writers of our time.
"If you like brave, acute, elated, naked, brutal, tender, humane, and beautiful prose, then you’ve come to the right place.”—Nicole Krauss
Cambridge, 1977: A Harvard graduate student, a Jew from Egypt, is preparing to become the assimilated American professor he longs to be. But when he bonds with a brash, charismatic Arab cab driver nicknamed Kalashnikov, he begins to neglect his studies. Together they carouse the bars and cafés of Cambridge, seduce strangers, ridicule “jumbo-ersatz” America, and skinny-dip in Walden Pond. As final exams approach and the cab driver is threatened with deportation, the grad student faces the decision of his life: whether to cling to his dream of New World assimilation or ditch it all to defend his Old World friend.
Sexually charged and enormously moving, this is a deeply American novel of identity and ideals in conflict. It is the book that will seal André Aciman’s reputation as one of the finest writers of our time.