Ferocity, winner of the Strega prize in 2015, is an exhilirating, ambitious, and vivid work of fiction by Nicola LaGioia, one of Italy's foremost literary novelists. The story is set in the ’80s in southern Italy, mainly in the cities of Taranto and the author's home...
"The novel begins in a railway station, a locomotive huffs, steam from a piston covers the opening of the chapter, a cloud of smoke hides part of the first paragraph." Playful, offbeat and fun this post-modernist puzzle of a book has always been one of my favourite...
Mystery, intrigue, and dark surprises combine in this Renaissance thriller depicting a deadly game of wits between the brilliant Leonardo da Vinci and the pope's inquisitor intent on bringing him to trial for heresy. Milan, 1497, and Leonardo is putting the finishing...
Often billed as the Spanish Ken Follett, Juan Gómez-Jurado is one of Spain's most succesful living authors, along with Javier Sierra and Carlos Ruiz Zafón. The Traitor's Emblem is a gripping and well-researched historical thriller which won the Premio de Novela Ciudad...
Dino Buzzati (1906 - 1972) is arguably the most loved and renowned Italian short story writer of the twentieth century. He is most famous for his existentialist novel "The Tartare Steppe," but his works are generally little known in English. From the age of 22 until...
Paolo Cognetti won the Strega Prize in 2017 with this semi-autobiographical novel set in the mountains of the Val d'Aosta in Northern Italy. Telling the story of Pietro and his parents, who come to live in the mountains every summer, and Pietro's enduring friendship...
Giordano, a physicist and mathematician before he became a writer of fiction, writes of love, death and family in simple, stripped-back prose in this poignant novel based on events from his own life. An intense exploration of what happens when you lose someone who is...
Italian seaside resorts are perhaps not so different from towns like Blackpool or Skegness, except for more reliable sunshine. Set in his home town of Forte dei Marmi on the Tuscan coast, Fabio Genovesi's Strega Prize-winning novel strips away the veneer and follows...
Mahir Guven’s prizewinning first novel is a blistering account of two French-Syrian brothers, growing into adulthood in a hostile Paris that offers them little in the way of opportunity. The story draws on the War in Syria as well as the repercussions from the Charlie...
Tuscan author and chemist Marco Malvaldi began writing in 2007 and is probably best known for his quirky detective series featuring barman Massimo and his elderly clientele-cum-sleuths at the Bar Lume.