Enigma Variations

“Perhaps the book’s greatest wonder is to suggest we can be wildly different people over the span of a life depending on what we lack,” wrote a perceptive *New York Times*.

[Andre Aciman](https://www.waterstones.com/author/andre-aciman/523872)’s *Enigma Variations* – a title drawn of course from Elgar’s orchestral cycle – charts the life and drifting loves of Paul, a man consumed, shaped and harmed by the objects of his desire.

From the glowing shores of southern Italy, where Paul fosters an adolescent obsession for his parents’ cabinet-maker, to his later complex liaisons, from Maud, to Manfred, to Chloe and beyond, through five episodic stories Paul paradoxically seeks a kind of purity: a dream of intense love.

“Aciman beautifully evokes that love, that obsessive love a man will have for a woman he’s not sure will, or can, reciprocate,” recorded the *Los Angeles Review of Books*. “More often than not, it is in our younger years; it’s oddly refreshing to read Paul’s struggles with it in middle age.”

With the ghosts of both Proust and Lawrence Durrell moving through the text, *Enigma Variations* is the summation of a powerful literary talent that began to explore fiction with the Lambda Literary Award-winning [*Call Me by Your Name*](https://www.waterstones.com/book/call-me-by-your-name/andre-aciman/9781843546535), a novel recently adapted for the cinema by Luca Guadagnino.

His memoir [*Out of Egypt*](https://www.waterstones.com/book/out-of-egypt/andre-aciman/9781845111496) was a recipient of the 1995 Whiting Award.