Last year, I missed the right moment to read André Aciman’s Call Me by Your Name: it is meant to be read in a heatwave and ideally while longing for someone exquisite. If the latter state of mind is not available, just a heatwave will do, but I waited too long and the heat was gone, leaving me with ordinary, mundane warmth – not sufficient to match the book’s mood.

This June I was ready for Aciman the moment temperatures in Brussels climbed past 30, then past 32, past 34 degrees. I took the book to the beach where even the evening felt like noon. I spent a day with it in the garden, where the hot air did not move and I forgot to put on sunscreen. Sweaty, dizzy and slightly sun-burnt is exactly how you want to be for this.

I’m sure you know the premise of the story, about two young men falling in love or maybe in lust in rural Italy, over six weeks of summer. It is a story of first love, or at least the first defining relationship; it is self-absorbed, sentimental, indulgent and repetitive – very much like first love, come to think of it. I’m not sure I like the book that much, but it doesn’t matter. Aciman does two things perfectly – summer and sex – and it’s enough. These things are beyond liking; primal and inevitable.

Aciman’s summer is the archetype of summers, filled with swimming, tennis and bike rides, sitting on the piazzas, reading in the sun, eating peaches and figs, sunbathing by the pool, having casually deep conversations. I don’t know if anyone really has summers like these, but we all have experienced elements of them; so if we’ve ever eaten a fig, we have now also been to that small Italian town, lived with the professor, spent time with Elio and Oliver by the pool, felt the same languor and tension.

Call Me by Your Name is the sexiest book I’ve ever read and I’ve read many. It is almost impossible to write about sex in a way that isn’t either embarrassing or pornographic but would still be true. Aciman succeeds to a degree that is almost unsettling. If you have ever had an intense sexual experience, it is bound to return and punch you in the gut (or lower). If you are currently in unchaste love, the book is going to mess you up and leave you breathless.

The depiction of desire goes beyond Elio and Oliver, the book says something I have always found to be true: that desire can be specific and universal at the same time, that at its best it’s borderless, all-encompassing, non-discriminating. And a gift.