The novel is structured non-chronologically, beginning after the central tragedy has already happened and then moving backwards through Lidia and Giovanni’s relationship until the final pages reach their first meeting. The book opens in 1994. Lidia is living in an almost empty apartment with only a table, four chairs, a bed and a few other […]
Andrea Morstabilini’s In Vacuo is a Gothic science-fiction novel about Henry Caxton, a poor boy who becomes the ward and eventually the medical apprentice of the brilliant, secretive Dr Robertson Hammond. What initially appears to be a Victorian Gothic mystery about a suspicious childbirth and a locked room gradually reveals itself as a story about […]
Emanuele Bosso’s Satelliti is a dual-period coming-of-age novel about Filippo and Tommaso, two boys whose friendship develops into an intense, ambiguous love that neither is able to define or fully escape. The title describes them as celestial bodies trapped within the same gravitational field: continually approaching and withdrawing, apparently capable of moving independently but never […]
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 […]
Nella palude del padre is not a conventional novel with an invented plot, but an autobiographical investigation in which Eraldo Affinati tries to reconstruct the hidden history of his father, Fortunato, and to understand how the wounds of previous generations shaped his own childhood, his relationship with his brother, his literary vocation and his work […]
In me dorme un grido is a reverent, heavily symbolic biographical novel about Niki de Saint Phalle and the creation of the Tarot Garden in Tuscany. It wants to be a novel about art, trauma, incest, motherhood, illness, feminist rage, magical thinking, creative collaboration, and the transformation of private horror into public wonder. Mostly, it […]
Erba Grama is a short, filthy, trauma-saturated return-home novel about Jacopo “Apo” Gambetta, a cocaine-addicted dentist whose mother dies and whose pregnant sister Selene drags him back to the rural hometown he has spent his adult life trying to avoid. It wants to be a novel about family secrets, childhood abuse, addiction, siblings, grief, provincial […]
A te penseranno gli avvoltoi is a frantic, obscene, meta-satirical picaresque about a narrator called Matteo, his friend Iurmiz di Bollate, a stolen porno-gore short-film idea, Tim Burton, Miley Cyrus, prison, fame, violence, literary ambition, and total personal collapse. It wants to be a comic novel, a confession, a prison memoir, a parody of toxic […]
L’eremo dei folli is a Sicilian forensic thriller about June McFlynn, a brilliant forensic entomologist with blue-shadowed blond hair, a yellow Hummer, a trauma-drenched past, and a habit of solving crimes by reading insects more intelligently than everyone else reads people. It wants to be a procedural, a feminist domestic-violence novel, a mother-daughter trauma story, […]