Nymph

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, a young American woman 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.

Sofia Montrone is a writer based in New York. She teaches at Columbia University, where she earned her MFA. Her short fiction and criticism have appeared in the Columbia Review, Quarto, and Adroit. Nymph is her debut novel.

'Polished, economic, swift, smart, spiritual...a transcendent work of intelligence.' Heidi Julavits, author of Directions to Myself

'Montrone’s lyrical prose is masterfully precise. Nymph is a dazzling debut that captures the dizzying intensity of first love.' Adam Wilson, author of Sensation Machines