Recommendations
Books Like Call Me by Your Name
What to read after Call Me by Your Name by André Aciman
André Aciman's Call Me by Your Name (2007) is one of the defining queer love stories in contemporary literary fiction — Elio and Oliver in northern Italy in the summer of 1983, the peach, the green bathing suit, the four minutes. If you were drawn to its obsessive interiority, its evocation of summer as a state of suspension, and its examination of a love remembered through the specific texture of its objects, these novels offer the same intensity.
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Giovanni's Room
by James Baldwin
An American man in Paris who is in love with an Italian bartender and cannot accept it — the ancestor of Call Me by Your Name: the same European setting, the same examination of what it costs to deny a love between men, but with a catastrophic ending that Aciman refuses
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Find Me
by André Aciman
Aciman's sequel — Oliver and Elio years later, and their fathers' new loves; widely considered inferior to Call Me by Your Name, but the right read if you cannot leave Italy in 1983
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Maurice
by E. M. Forster
A Cambridge-educated Englishman in Edwardian England who falls in love with a man — written in 1913–14, published posthumously in 1971; the closest British parallel to Call Me by Your Name in its examination of what it means to finally accept that you love a man
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The Swimming-Pool Library
by Alan Hollinghurst
A wealthy young English man in 1983 London who discovers his grandfather's involvement in the persecution of gay men — the same 1983 setting as Call Me by Your Name, the same lush attention to the physical world, the same sense of queer life as both a secret and a richness
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Enigma Variations
by André Aciman
A man in five stages of his life, each centered on a different version of desire and love — the same Aciman voice as Call Me by Your Name, the same obsessive attention to the moment desire is registered in the body, the same Mediterranean light
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A Little Life
by Hanya Yanagihara
Four male friends in New York and the cost of what one of them carries — deeply difficult reading but the same refusal to simplify male love or pretend that damage and tenderness are separable
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Less
by Andrew Sean Greer
A mediocre American novelist who flees the country to avoid attending his ex-lover's wedding — a Pulitzer Prize winner that is funny where Call Me by Your Name is intense, but the same examination of what it means to have loved a man and lost him
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On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
by Ocean Vuong
A letter from a Vietnamese-American son to his illiterate mother, telling her things she will never read — the same lyrical obsessiveness as Aciman, the same sense of love as something that exceeds the words available to describe it, the same examination of a queer first love
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