What are Elio and Oliver doing all these years later?
What more is there to say about 2017’s greatest queer story of love, heartbreak, and semen-y peaches? Well, Call Me By Your Name author André Aciman plans to continue the story of Elio and Oliver with an official sequel to the book.
Titled Find Me, the follow-up to the acclaimed novel will be published in October 2019. As the first book teased in its final pages, the sequel will pick up the story a few years later, and will focus some of the story more on Samuel, Elio’s father.
According to the publishing house Farrar, Straus, and Giroux: “In Find Me, Aciman shows us Elio’s father Samuel, now divorced, on a trip from Florence to Rome to visit Elio, who has become a gifted classical pianist. A chance encounter on the train leads to a relationship that changes Sami’s life definitively. Elio soon moves to Paris where he too has a consequential affair, while Oliver, now a professor in northern New England with sons who are nearly grown, suddenly finds himself contemplating a return visit to Europe.”
Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name film, which debuted in 2017 and starred Timothée Chalamet and Armie Hammer, had a wild critical and fan reception. It prompted Aciman to consider writing the sequel to the 2007 novel, an intention he originally shared on Twitter towards the end of last year.
Rumours have swirled of a film follow-up too, but Hammer has bluntly put a stop to that – speaking with Vulture last week, he said: “If we do make a second one, I think we’re setting ourselves up for disappointment. I’m not sure that it was ever really definitely going to happen. People just seemed so excited about it that we were like, ‘Oh, yeah, fuck it! We’ll do it, sure… it’s not real until it is.”
Speaking to Vulture, Aciman said of the forthcoming book: “The world of Call Me By Your Name never left me. Though I created the characters and was the author of their lives, what I never expected was that they’d end up teaching me things about intimacy and about love that I didn’t quite think I knew until I’d put them down on paper. The film made me realise that I wanted to be back with them and watch them over the years – which is why I wrote Find Me.”
Aciman released his most recent novel Enigma Variations in November last year – a story of a man’s journey through life and complex, at times broken relationships with both men and women across multiple continents. Aciman previously spoke to Dazed about how to go about writing the ultimate love story.
Find Me by André Aciman is out on Farrar, Straus, and Giroux in October 2019
