Fabio Geda’s Cencio is a historical coming-of-age novel built around the catastrophic Florence flood of November 1966. It alternates between the experiences of thirteen-year-old Sergio “Cencio” Alderighi, a working-class Florentine boy whose family loses almost everything in the disaster, and the diary of Nicola Sammichele, a privileged twenty-year-old law student who travels from Taranto to […]
Licia Tumminello’s La lunga estate dei gelsomini is a historical novel set primarily in Milazzo, Sicily, during the final months of 1945, with an epilogue extending into the summer of 1946. It follows Grazia Costa, a twenty-three-year-old jasmine picker whose personal awakening becomes inseparable from the first organised rebellion of the women working in the […]
The Tulip Poplars is a sprawling Appalachian historical romance about Tom Foster, Amos Lewis, Maeve Day, and Paschal Collins, four people whose lives are shaped by forbidden love, religion, race, shame, trees, music, exile, and the long, punishing work of surviving in a place that mostly refuses to let them be fully human. It wants […]
Le attitudini is a historical-archival romance about two marginal young people caught in the fever of late-eighteenth-century Europe: Bruno Röder, a sickly German youth drawn toward Jena Romanticism, and Marianna “Nenna” Di Dio, a Salentine orphan educated in Naples under the dazzling shadow of Emma Hamilton. It wants to be a novel about youth, revolution, […]
In One Brief Moment All Eternity is a fictionalised account of Gustave Flaubert’s life, constructed through an omniscient narrative and a chorus of approximately thirty female and non-human voices. The novel combines literary biography, feminist revisionism, historical fiction, magical realism and reflections on the relationship between writers and their creations. Its central conceit is that […]
The Enigmas is an over-engineered time-slip Second World War novel that piles Bletchley Park, women doctors, inherited female trauma, magical memory, mother-daughter guilt, queer wartime secrecy, codebreaking, and alternate history into one very familiar package. It wants to be moving, intricate, feminist, romantic, and clever about “enigmas,” but it is mostly a relentlessly tidy machine. […]
This is a historical novel that blends real figures, fictional narration, myth, and memory to tell the story of the small Mallorcan village of Deià and the extraordinary group of artists who transformed it during the twentieth century. The novel is not only about Robert Graves and Laura Riding, the famous poet couple who settled […]
A historical mystery set in Palermo in December 1783, around Christmas, among convents, aristocratic palaces, poor streets, presepi, zampognari, superstition, politics, and poison. The novel opens with a shock: fra’ Gerlando, a Franciscan friar loved by the people and trusted by many nobles, is found dead in his cell. The young fra’ Cosimo tells the […]
Il Maestro del Duce is a historical novel in diary form about Guido Centofanti, a young Fascist schoolteacher from Tuscany who is sent in 1937 to Morra Terzana, a remote mountain village in southern Italy. The novel wants to be a story of political awakening: a naïve, Mussolini-worshipping teacher arrives as an agent of Fascist […]
Alice Winn’s Worship opens not with anticipation but with certainty. Sir Tristram knows he is about to die. He has been told so by Sir Palomides, the knight who now stands over him with a sword. Isode the Fair is with Tristram as he bleeds, frantic with grief, while Tristram, unable to speak, reflects that […]