Books & Reviews Archive

The novel is set in Madrid during World War II: it is a period of deep economic crisis, marked by widespread squalor and a sense of "hopeless waiting"—the expectation of generic change paired with resigned pessimism. Dona Visi is happy because her daughter has found a fiancé, > someone studying for a position as a notary , her husband > tosses and turns between the sheets, > Fine, hold off

For much of the novel, the brilliant friend seems to be Lila; she is intelligent, capable of mastering any subject (even Latin) without attending school; she is brave, creative, enterprising; with adolescence, she also blossoms into a stunning young woman. Elena, the first-person narrator and co-protagonist alongside Lila, has been enthralled by her since elementary school, yearning to resemble h

Imagine something akin to Anna Premoli’s novel (*Ti prego lasciati odiare*): a love story, delicate, mildly ironic, woven from brisk dialogue and youthful musings. It could be a tender fairy tale, were it not set in Jordan—which, for most women, is > an oppressive prison, its atmosphere rendered all the more fraught by the risk of dying at the hands of one’s own relatives. Jordan is my home.

The context is the French Revolution. > Revolution is like those decks of playing cards where kings, queens, and jacks are split down the middle, one right side up and the other upside down, head up and head down; you turn and spin the card, but not a damn thing changes, the king standing upright is forever tied to the inverted one, as if sneering mockingly at him, as if whispering from below: I

> How to accept remaining blind in order to be happy, how to turn one's back on oneself without facing one's own negation?... non does not restore grace to a rose by transplanting it into a pot, one denatures it; one believes one is embellishing the living room, yet in truth one does nothing but disfigure one's own garden . Amin, an Arab Israeli, is a brilliant surgeon, happily integrated into

The book collects three novels featuring Héctor Belascoarán as their protagonist. The first novel, *Days of Combat* (1986), recounts the protagonist’s life transformation: from a married engineer and corporate executive to a detective searching for clients and, on his own initiative, hunting down a serial strangler. In reality, the hunt for the strangler is a way to find himself, to escape a lif

On this site, we have already published a review of the first volume of the great Berlin saga, written between 2015 and 2018 by Fabio Geda and Marco Magnone (see *I fuochi di Tegel*). In a “worn and decaying Berlin,” an epidemic had wiped out all adults, leaving only those under the age of eighteen alive: they had plummeted into a > violent, primordial world beyond time, [that] was robbing them

*Borders* (2022) and *No Borders* (2023) are two novels that develop the same story and must be read and reviewed together. The common thread can be identified in one of the many literary references found in both books: the short story *The Seven Messengers* by Dino Buzzati. The prince, having set out to explore his father’s kingdom, after years of travel recognizes that > there is no border, I

The title and nineteenth-century framework suggest a great social novel centered on the decline of an upper-bourgeois mercantile family. As often happens with great books, as one delves deeper into the reading (and we imagine the same occurred for the author while writing it), another theme emerges: the unstoppable force driving toward dissolution, decay, and death. To express the novel’s profou

> My name is Rajab Shaaban. It is not my real name, but one I borrowed. (...) It belonged to someone I knew many years ago . Already from this sentence, which introduces one of the two protagonists, we can grasp several of the novel's hallmark traits: the lie, as both subterfuge and a relish for storytelling; destiny and absolution from sin, for Sha'ban is the eighth month of the year, > when

This short novel recalls a novella by Giuseppe Verga: *La Varanisa* (see the review of *Le novelle* on this site). The Sicilian writer admirably synthesizes the peasant condition by describing the feet of a wretched girl: > those feet accustomed to walking in the snow and on rocks scorched by the sun, to tearing themselves on thorns, or hardening on stones, could have been beautiful . In the sa

> I wish it were she who wrote about me. To gather thoughts about those years centuries away. To justify my cowardice, my need for certainty... I am a seeker of gold nuggets, I collect precious fragments, intersections of my life with hers, thoughts of her, sudden emotions that interrupted years of my heart's silence, years of absence. I stretch time so as not to reach the epilogue with which

Journey, flight, and the quest for change constitute the themes of this novel, set in the arid Sicilian landscape and amid a thousand cities—real in name, yet fantastical and imaginary in their depiction. Two shepherds, father and son; a girl on the run, who finds refuge with an aging itinerant prostitute; two young newlyweds, perpetually traveling for reasons impossible to know; a father seeking

The novel is set in the early twentieth century, at the close of the Meiji Restoration or Renovation: the prolonged era between 1867 and 1912 that began with the reassertion of imperial power over the Tokugawa Shogunate. This historical anchor serves not only to contextualize the narrative—centered on the ambiguous and complex relationship between two generations—but also to underscore its contemp

The novel is set in Chile, ten years after the coup d'état that brought Pinochet and the military junta to power, establishing a brutal dictatorship: Chile, > a spot on the map, immersed in a vast and prodigious continent where progress arrives centuries late, (...) a territory in whose eternal humus mythological animals drag themselves along and human beings live unchanged since the dawn of the

The figure of Dracula has spawned a literary and cinematographic output that has exalted its horrific aspects, thereby distorting the complexity of Stoker's novel. The opening of the narrative reflects the preconceived notion we have of Dracula’s story. Jonathan Harker, a young real estate solicitor, travels to the Carpathians to conclude the sale of a property to Count Dracula, who intends to mov

> For ten years now I had been living up here in Vallorgàna alone, in the villa of my ancestors. (...) I was certain that I found myself in the best fortune I could desire. Nothing of importance occurred in my days. Nothing complex entangled my gaze. No disruption in daily life. No decision to hinder my stride . Such is the opening of the tale of the man we will come to know only as the Duke. Hei

Chelli is a “minor” nineteenth-century author, forgotten and relegated to the margins of Italian literature. Only Benedetto Croce remembered him in his *Letteratura della Nuova Italia*, misspelling his surname to boot (calling him Ghelli) and citing him as a chronicler of the bourgeoisie of Rome as capital. Chelli, however, is a fine writer, both for his narrative technique and his original hand

> Fieramosca's father, grown old in the wars that tore Italy asunder during the fifteenth century, could give Ettore nothing but a sword; and as a youth, the latter believed the profession of arms to be the only one worthy of him, nor could he for many years conceive thoughts above the times in which he lived, wherein the force of arms was employed solely to augment reputation and wealth. Ma wisd

A renowned septuagenarian writer, Choko Kogito, returns to his childhood home to examine the suitcase where documents said to reveal the reasons behind his father's suicide are supposedly hidden. We find ourselves in a forest on the banks of the waters where his father drowned on a stormy evening. Choko visits the memorial commissioned by his mother to commemorate the tragic event. > A large, rou

An old junk dealer, a drunkard and charlatan, stitches together a corpse from the fragments of bodies torn apart by bombs—so frequent in Baghdad during the American occupation in 2005 and 2006. An old woman lives in contemplation of a painting of Saint George, who, in her eyes, has promised the return of her son, missing for twenty-five years in the Iran-Iraq War. Hasib, a young hotel security g

The book is part of a series that explores social and civic issues through the lens of noir. In this case, the backdrop is the Camorra. Leonardo is a businessman colluding with organized crime. Seeking revenge for a slight, he attempts to kill someone under the protection of a powerful clan boss and is subsequently forced to go on the run, accompanied by his daughter, who remains entirely unawa

A few years before his death, an illustrious jurist retraces his childhood in a timeless Nuoro; and > as in a developing negative, distant faces reappear, (...) and perhaps, as I think of their life, because I write their life, they sense me as a ridiculous god, who has summoned them on the day of judgment, to free them forever from their memory . It could easily be a mundane autobiography, in

The novel is set in Bangladesh during the brief yet bloody war of liberation from Pakistan, from March to December 1971. The author traces the events from the perspective of Rehana: a woman who wishes merely to be a wife and mother: > she had married a man she did not expect to love; she lived a life of composure, a life with few surprises. She had asked her father to find her a husband with f