My Roman Year
André Aciman
Faber, £22, pp368
It was in 1966 that Call Me By Your Name author Aciman first arrived in Italy. Just a teenager, he was responsible for his deaf mother and a younger brother after their expulsion, along with other Jews and foreigners, from Alexandria. In Rome, impulsive, bullying Uncle Claude sublets them a shabby flat in a neighbourhood bearing no resemblance to the imperial wonders of Aciman’s imagination. Even so, it’s his slow appreciation of the city that shapes this transporting coming-of-age memoir in which beauty and the anguish of exile and displacement are rendered with the same sensuous, questing intensity that characterises his fiction.
Madwoman
Chelsea Bieker
Oneworld, £16.99, pp336
Married mother of two Clove is living the ultimate “grammable” life in Portland, Oregon, all organic wellness supplements and ethically made #cottagecore dresses. She’s also a thwarted writer but her greatest work of fiction, it turns out, is the self she presents not just to her followers but to her husband and young children – the self she constructed after fleeing home at 17. The strain is already showing when a letter from a women’s prison arrives, providing the catalyst for a true-crime-style plot into which Bieker folds themes of domestic violence and inherited trauma. Suspenseful and satisfying.
Mapping the Darkness: The Visionary Scientists Who Unlocked the Mysteries of Sleep
Kenneth Miller
Oneworld, £10.99, pp352 (paperback)
As areas of scientific study go, the exploration of sleep is still relatively new, its roots stretching back little more than a century – this, despite the fact that we spend roughly a third of our lives asleep. To illuminate its important evolution, journalist Miller focuses on four pioneers, among them Nathaniel Kleitman, who fled pogroms in Russia and undertook immersive studies requiring him to stay awake for 115 hours and live in a cave for a month. It’s an enlightening story, ably told.
• To order My Roman Year, Madwoman or Mapping the Darkness: The Visionary Scientists Who Unlocked the Mysteries of Sleep go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
