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Room on the Sea

Room on the Sea

By André Aciman

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Romance, Fiction, Short Stories, Audiobook

Book Details

Published: June 24, 2025

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Print length: 274 pages

In Room on the Sea, André Aciman delivers a luminous collection of short fictions that explore the fragile, shifting terrain of love, where longing and doubt coexist, and every connection feels both inevitable and uncertain.

Told in Aciman’s signature lyrical and nostalgic voice, these stories dive into the emotional contradictions of romance: the hesitation before a confession, the thrill of possibility, and the quiet ache of what might have been. Each narrative captures the delicate push and pull of desire, where attraction is rarely simple, and love is never straightforward.

In “The Gentleman from Peru,” a group of friends vacationing on the Amalfi Coast find their lives subtly transformed by an enigmatic stranger whose presence lingers long after he’s gone. The title story, “Room on the Sea,” unfolds as an intimate, charged dialogue between two strangers brought together by jury duty, whose connection evolves into something at once complicated and compelling. Meanwhile, “Mariana” reimagines a classic tale of forbidden love, giving new life to the story of a nun entangled with a charming yet unreliable aristocrat.

With emotional precision and poetic depth, Aciman captures the fleeting, often contradictory nature of modern relationships, the yeses and nos, the closeness and distance, the hope and hesitation that define love today. Room on the Sea is not just read, it’s felt, drawing readers into moments of beauty, vulnerability, and quiet revelation.

Audiobook

About the Author

André Aciman is a New York Times bestselling novelist, memoirist, and essayist known for his deeply introspective and lyrical explorations of love, memory, and identity. Born in Alexandria, Egypt, and raised in a multilingual, multicultural family, Aciman’s early life across Egypt, Italy, and the United States profoundly shapes the emotional depth and global sensibility of his writing.

After moving to New York City, he earned a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Harvard University and went on to teach at institutions including Princeton University and Bard College. He is currently a Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at The Graduate Center of City University of New York, where he also founded and directs The Writers’ Institute and chairs the Ph.D. program in Comparative Literature.

Aciman is the author of numerous acclaimed works, including the Whiting Award–winning memoir Out of Egypt and the internationally celebrated novel Call Me by Your Name, which won the Lambda Literary Award and was adapted into an Academy Award–winning film directed by Luca Guadagnino. His body of work spans novels, essays, and edited volumes, with frequent contributions to major publications such as The New Yorker, The New York Times, and The Paris Review. A noted scholar of Marcel Proust, Aciman often weaves themes of time, longing, and remembrance into his writing.

His books have been translated into multiple languages and continue to resonate with readers worldwide. He is currently working on his next novel and a new collection of essays.