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 […]
Lo speziale di Steinbrueck is a historical mystery and life-story built around Giacomo d’Andrea, a poor Friulian boy who becomes the wealthy Austrian merchant Gottlob Kramer. The novel moves between two main timelines: Giacomo’s childhood and apprenticeship in the late 1600s and early 1700s, and his return to his native village of Orgnasso in 1738, […]
Santa Barbara is a multigenerational southern Italian family saga about poverty, desire, migration, work, money, betrayal, religious myth and the way children inherit the ruins made by adults. It begins in Capurso, near Bari, with Nunzia Battista, a poor sixteen-year-old girl, watching Nicola Epifania from under a carob tree while he fails to control a […]
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 […]
Cellulosa is a dark coming-of-age novel about a group of young people in a tiny inland hamlet who turn grief, boredom, political language, adolescent desire and workplace death into a ridiculous but real terrorist cell. It is set around Trecase, a dying cluster of houses above the town of Caino, and the paper mill by […]
A Sardinian crime novel, but also a book about narration, tourism, identity, journalism, middle age and the impossibility of fully “explaining” a place from outside. Its ostensible case is the murder of Antonio Maria Monni, shot in the countryside near the coastal town of Villapedrosa. Its deeper subject is Sardinia as both real place and […]
Una splendida rovina is an autofictional novel about a writer-narrator who, in his thirties, tries to escape the stalled ruins of his own life by buying an actual ruin in the countryside with a woman he has just fallen in love with. The book begins with the sentence that contains the whole plot: “We wanted […]