Trick is a stylish drama about ambition, family and old age that goes beyond the ordinary and predictable. Daniele Mallarico is a successful ilustrator who, in the twilight of his years, feels that his reputation and his artistic prowess are fading. Mario is Daniele's...
At the Bar Lume, in a small coastal resort in Northern Italy, between shots of espresso and hands of cards, four old-timers and Massimo the barman while away the time chatting, arguing and theorising about the murder of a young woman in their town.They analise the...
The first in the famous Neapolitan quartet of novels, in My Brilliant Friend we meet Elena and Lila for the first time as they navigate the beginning of their lifelong friendship, the poverty of 1950s Naples, and the inexplicable behaviour of adults. A literary...
Together with her partner, the Hungarian Endre Friedmann, Gerda Taro was one half of the alias Robert Capa, widely considered to be the twentieth century's greatest war and political photographer. Taro was killed while documenting the Spanish Civil War and tragically...
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...
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...