Set over two sun-drenched Italian summers, a gorgeous coming-of-age story which revels in the awkward lows and exuberant highs of girlhood
Ten-year-old Leo spends her mornings tidying the rooms of her nonna’s time-worn Italian hotel, quietly accumulating the junk and treasures left behind by guests – a pearl earring, a lock of hair. Her nights are suffused with her father’s liquor-spun tales of his childhood, mingled with stories of Greek heroes of old.
Years later, over another hot, endless Italian summer, the hotel is one of the only things in Leo’s life that has remained constant. An accident has knocked her family sideways; her brother Max is distant and Nonna has grown frail. But then she meets Dolores, an American girl who sets something alight in Leo that she didn’t know existed.
Heat-soaked, sensual and steeped in an exquisite longing, Nymph traverses the extraordinary pains, soaring pleasures and many metamorphoses it takes to finally grow up.
“Montrone travels with sure-footed grace through two lush and flourishing locales: the mountains of Northern Italy, and the interior landscape of its young protagonist. While the spaces it explores may be untamed, Montrone’s lyrical prose is masterfully precise. Nymph is a dazzling debut that captures the dizzying intensity of first love”
Adam Wilson
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“This shimmering gem of a novel invites you to re-experience that gut-punch feeling of youthful summer romance. Suffused with moody sunsets, lush summer heat and confused yearning, studded with scenes of startling clarity and swoon-worthy sentences, Nymph is a truly impressive debut”
Anelise Chen
“Luscious and transporting, Nymph is an evocative and affecting portrait of a family in flux, and a queer coming-of-age tale deliciously suffused with memory and desire. This book will linger with you long after you turn the last page”
Grace Flahiv
“Montrone’s prose is polished, economic, swift, smart, spiritual. Nymph shows that a book is not defined by its subject matter. It’s a transcendent work of intelligence that is also a transcendent work of the senses”
Heidi Julavits
Sofia Montrone is a writer based in New York. She teaches at Columbia University, where she earned her MFA. Her fiction and criticism have appeared in the Columbia Review, Quarto and Adroit.