NYMPH pairs Call Me by Your Name with the precise, elevated prose of Elena Ferrante. Sofia Montrone’s debut revels in the exuberant highs and awkward lows of girlhood, set to the backdrop of rural Lombardy.

NYPMH
by Sofia Montrone
Avid Reader Press, publication date TBD
(via The Friedrich Agency)

Leo spends her mornings tidying the rooms of her Nonna Tina’s timeworn Italian agriturismo, carefully accumulating the curious leftbehind detritus from guests—a pearl earring, a lock of hair. At night, she gathers the stories that flow from her father’s lips—liquor-spun tales of Odysseus and the Trojans in secret battle. When an accident rips the gentle membrane of Leo’s childhood, she is left vulnerable to the pains and pleasures of growing up.

Years later, in a sultry summer not unlike the many that came before, 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. When she meets Dolores, an American girl, she can’t help but gather all the experiences first love promises, while shedding parts of the past she no longer fits into.

Sofia Montrone is as an adjunct assistant professor in Columbia’s Undergraduate Writing Program, served as Editor-in-Chief of The Columbia Review and the Director of Columbia Artist/Teachers.