Excerpt from Roman Year by Andre Aciman, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Her one regret was that she should not have settled for his price. She should have asked for more. He had the money with him, she saw it. And he would have paid. Instead, he fleeced us. My mother, who was known for being a defiant haggler in the marketplace, had taken what he offered and even thanked him. When you've lost everything and time has run out, you settle for the first offer.

It made perfect sense somehow that the man who purchased our furniture should also be selling us suitcases. He was in the business of plundering foreigners and then seeing them off with suitcases sold in his store. The money he paid for the furniture he got back by selling suitcases. The summary expulsion of foreigners and Jews was an added measure meant to close the deal and make it impossible for people to renege on their sale or turn back the clock.

No wonder the suitcases avoided my glance each time I attempted to extract some recognition from them. All they did was sit bilious and sullen, as if I were guilty of a sinister misdeed whose brunt was now theirs to bear. "Why have you brought us here?" they seemed to say, "and what's to happen to us now?" They were asking me questions that I could just as easily have asked myself. What am I doing here? What's to happen to me now? We were, like the suitcases, marooned and landless, and I saw this for the first time by staring at their strapped leather shapes standing gawkily lined up in the hangar, fattened, lumpish, and scared, like doleful cows waiting their turn, mistrusting everything, down to the feral cat who'd seen too many suitcases and wasn't about to offer a sympathetic glance.

Excerpted from Roman Year by Andre Aciman. Copyright © 2024 by Andre Aciman. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.