You're listening to the London Review of Books podcast. This week we have a guest episode from the podcast of the London Review Bookshop, a recording of a recent event with Elif Batuman and Mervais Emery. The London Review Bookshop podcast comes out every Wednesday and has an archive of more than 400 events. You can find it wherever you get your podcasts.

If you can't get to the bookshop in London for events, some of them are now broadcast online,

so you can watch them live from anywhere in the world. There's one of those tomorrow, Wednesday,

the 24th of August, with the food writers Rebecca May Johnson and Jonathan Nunn. For details of how to buy tickets to that

or any other event, follow the link below or go to the London Review Bookshop website.

Join me in welcoming, Mary, and Elif.

So we thought the best way to begin for those of you who haven't already read the book was for Elif to kick things off with a brief reading from it before we chat.

So do you want to just tell us which part you're reading from, where it appears in either or?

I am reading from the very beginning from page five and the, you know, the only thing that you need to know is that she got back to school.

Okay, so I'm just going to start.

Svetlana got to campus the day after me, though it felt like years.

I had already slept the night in my new room, eaten breakfast and lunch in the cafeteria, and made numerous trips back and forth to the

storage facility, having the same conversation over and over. How is your summer? How was your

summer? How was hungry? I was dissatisfied by the vagueness of my own answers. I still

hadn't figured out the right angle. How I was hungry,

Lakshmi asked at lunch with a conspiratorial sparkle. Did anything happen? Notwithstanding my

strong feeling that a lot of things had happened, I answered the question truthfully in the sense

that I knew Lakshmi intended it. Nothing had happened.

Svetlana asked me the same question that evening,

when we met at her warehouse-like suite in New Quincy

and sat on beanbag chairs under an Edward Hopper poster

and talked about everything that had happened since the last time we had spoken

...