Selin, a tall, highly strung Turkish-American from New Jersey turns up at Harvard and finds herself dangerously overwhelmed by the challenges and possibilities. Along the way she befriends Svetlana, a cosmopolitan Serb, and obsesses over Ivan, a mathematician from Hungary. Selin ponders how culture and language shape who we are, how difficult it is to be a failed writer, and how baffling love is. "I loved it and could have read a thousand more pages of it".Emma Cline