Call Me by Your Name, by André Aciman (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $23). Aciman’s first novel shows him to be an acute grammarian of desire. When Oliver, a handsome young American philosopher, arrives in a seaside town in Italy to work on a book about Heraclitus, as the guest of an Italian professor, the son of the house, Elio—seventeen, studious, moody, and ravenous—falls for him. Elio’s edgy rapture as he forms himself in relation to another plays out against the background of a scorching Mediterranean summer, and Aciman introduces a small universe of characters who are themselves altered by the charged air that surrounds the lovers: Elio’s mother, who calls Oliver il cauboi (the cowboy); his generous, hazy father; and the household’s cantankerous cook, who every morning carefully cracks open the American’s soft-boiled eggs.