Reading Order
Call Me by Your Name Reading Order
André Aciman's Call Me by Your Name (2007) is a standalone novel set in the summer of 1983 in a seaside town in northern Italy. Seventeen-year-old Elio Perlman falls in love with Oliver, a twenty-four-year-old American graduate student who comes to spend six weeks at Elio's family's villa. The novel was adapted into a film by Luca Guadagnino in 2017, with Timothée Chalamet and Armie Hammer; the film won an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. A sequel, Find Me (2019), follows Oliver and Elio years later but can be skipped.
Where to start
Call Me by Your Name
Complete Call Me by Your Name Book List
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Call Me by Your Name
André Aciman·2007·Begin here — Elio, seventeen, and Oliver, twenty-four, in northern Italy in the summer of 1983; the definitive summer love novel in contemporary queer literary fiction; adapted into an Academy Award–winning film in 2017 - Buy
Find Me
OptionalAndré Aciman·2019·Sequel — Oliver and Elio years later; widely considered inferior to Call Me by Your Name and can be skipped; check reviews before reading if you want the Elio-Oliver world preserved
Call Me by Your Name — Frequently Asked Questions
Is Call Me by Your Name part of a series?
Call Me by Your Name is self-contained as a reading experience. A sequel, Find Me (2019), was published twelve years later and follows Oliver and Elio as adults and their fathers as they meet new loves. Critical reception was mixed — many readers and reviewers felt the sequel diluted what made the original novel powerful. Reading Call Me by Your Name alone is the standard recommendation.
What does 'call me by your name and I'll call you by mine' mean?
Near the end of the novel, Elio and Oliver share their names with each other — Oliver says 'Call me by your name, and I'll call you by mine.' The gesture suggests a complete identification between the two people: I am you; you are me; there is no distance between us. It is the novel's most romantic and most impossible gesture — the desire to be not just loved but inhabited by the person you love, to lose yourself in another person completely. It also acknowledges that such identification is temporary: Oliver leaves at the end of the summer.
How does the film differ from the novel?
The film adaptation by Luca Guadagnino (screenplay by James Ivory, who won the Academy Award) is widely praised but compresses the novel significantly — Elio's extensive interior monologue, which takes up most of the novel, is much reduced onscreen. The film is sunny and sensory where the novel is psychologically dense and obsessive. The famous closing scene of Elio looking into the fire was added for the film and is not in the novel. Most readers who saw the film first find the novel a significantly different and deeper experience.
Is Call Me by Your Name appropriate for all readers?
Call Me by Your Name contains explicit sexual content between a seventeen-year-old and a twenty-four-year-old. Both characters are male. The age difference and the sexual content make the novel adult reading, recommended for readers eighteen and over. The sexual content is explicit rather than implied. Readers sensitive to the age differential should be aware of this before reading.
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