Forced back to her remote hometown by the war, Giulia is immediately drawn to a couple in a similar situation: graceful, spontaneous Ada and her husband Paolo, a sickly teacher and partisan in hiding. Joined from Turin by Giulia's husband Stefano, the two couples form an intense bond; as the Germans begin to occupy Italy, a subtle dance of attractions begins, intensified by their shared isolation and the muffled hum of threat over a long, hard winter.In prose of subtle, enigmatic a...

Upon the death of her husband, Innocenzo Monti, Lalla Romano sought to distil the essence of their long life together. The result was In Farthest Seas: a piercingly intimate retelling of the first four years and final four months of their relationship, built from shard-like moments of connection and revelation.With precise artistry, Romano braids together seemingly minor details-the expressiveness of Innocenzo's hands, the beauty of his face in sleep, a fleeting instance o...

A lonely little boy's unlikely friendship with his grandparents' grizzled old groundskeeper leads him down the rabbit hole from a life lived solely in books to a wonderful and terrifying hell of long-buried secrets, shadowy partisans, murdered Nazis, thefts, lies, doppelgängers, bloodthirsty slugs, and the unquiet dead.

Long before the latest vogue for autofiction, Michele Mari, one of Italy's most beloved authors, cast his mind back to the days of his own childhood, and found it crawling with monsters. Raised on comic books and science fiction, the young Mari constructed an alternate universe for himself untouched by uncomprehending grownups or sadistic peers. Compared to the horrors of real life, Long John Silver and Cthulhu made for positively cuddly company; but little boys raised by beasts may well g...

**BUSTLE BEST BOOK OF THE WEEK PICKNAMED A BOOKSHOP.ORG RECOMMENDED READING OF THE SEASONIn this charming, deeply atmospheric novel set against the Amalfi Coast of the 1950s, two women form an intense and lasting friendship that embodies the paradoxes of Italian society.**Inspired by her own adventurous, unconventional life, actress and writer Goliarda Sapienza’s recently rediscovered novel takes the reader to the sun-drenched town of Positano in southern It...