The latest addition to my website is Margherita Giacobino‘s L’età ridicola (The Ridiculous Age). This novel tells the story of an unnamed elderly woman whio is aware that death is not far away. She lives in an upstairs flat in a city with her also very elderly cat. She has an immigrant carer, Gabriela,. She … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Diego Marani‘s La città celeste (The Celestial City). This is a humorous, colourful, (semi-)autobiographical account of a young Italian man going to Trieste to study translation and interpreting and his time there. His main motive is to escape his strict, domineering father. However, in his various activities – … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Jean-Baptiste Andrea‘s Veiller sur elle [Watch Over Her]/. This novel won the Prix Goncourt in 2023. It tells the story iof Mimo (real name Michelangelo), son of sculptor, who is apprenticed to a family friend and soon proves better than his master, to the latter’s annoyance. They settle … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Carmine Abate‘s Il ballo tondo (The Round Dance). Abate comes from the Arbëreshë community, descendants of Albanians who fled the Ottomans between between the 14th and the 18th centuries and settled in Italy. This novel is set in Hora, a small Arbëreshë town in Calabria and for most … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Grazia Deledda‘s Marianna Sirca. The book is set in Deledda’s native Sardinia. The eponymous heroine has worked all her life, obeying orders from first her father and then looking after her priest-uncle. The agreement was that she would look after her uncle and then would inherit his estate … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Fausta Cialente‘s Ballata Levantina (The Levantines). This novel tells the story of well-to-do European expatriates (primarily but certainly not exclusively Italian) living in Egypt (primarily Alexandria) from the 1920s to the end of World War II. Our heroine is Daniela. Her grandmother, Francesca, had been a successful dancer … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Daniele Mencarelli‘s Tutto chiede salvezza (Everything Calls For Salvation). This is an autobiographical novel about seven days Mencarelli spent in a mental institution in 1994.He was bipolar and had a breakdown, smashing his house up and causing his father to collapse. We follow his seven days and that … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Luca Rastello‘s Piove all’insù (The Rain’s Falling Up. The book is primarily set in the 1970s-80s in Turin, though told from the perspective of a later date, in the 2000s. It is narrated by Pietro Miasco. We first meet him as a young boy but, as he grows … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Marino Magliani‘s Soggiorno a Zeewijk (A Window to Zeewijk). This is a novel in the tradition of writers such as W G Sebald and Esther Kinsky in that Marino Magliani has moved to Zeewijk on the Dutch coast and writes about his impressions, the people, the landscape and … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Maurizio Maggiani‘s Il romanzo della nazione [The Novel of the Nation]. Despite its somewhat arrogant title, it is, in fact, primarily the story of the author’s family and, particularly his father, a man who fought in World War II, became a Communist, is austere and never shows any … Read more