Books from Italy

Set in postwar Japan in 1959, Twilight in Musashino begins with the discovery of a young Japanese flight attendant strangled on the icy banks of a river. As Detective Fujisawa investigates the murder, his attention turns to a foreign priest and the Guglielmo Church, a charitable Christian mission with an unsettling connection to the victim. What initially appears to be a straightforward criminal investigation gradually reveals a tangled web involving narcotics, postwar relief operations, and international diplomacy. The deeper Fujisawa digs, the more he encounters powerful institutions determined to protect their reputations and conceal uncomfortable truths. Blending meticulous police work with an incisive examination of social power, Seicho Matsumoto constructs a slow-burning mystery in which the pursuit of justice collides with political influence and institutional silence. The novel offers a compelling portrait of a society negotiating its identity in the aftermath of war, exposing the tensions between public morality and private corruption.

Three generations of the Ansaldo family grapple with the aftermath of a tragic murder in this sweeping, cinematic debut set in 1980s Rome, for fans of Elena Ferrante and Liz Moore. It’s a sultry August night when sixteen-year-old Betta Ansaldo convinces her cousin Miriam to sneak out to the local beach for a party. Only Miriam returns. Traumatized by the violence she’s witnessed, she remains silent. The small community is riven with grief, none more so than the Ansaldos, who search for answers they cannot find. Who did Betta cross paths with on that fateful night? What was she doing there? And how could such a horrific crime happen in such a peaceful place? As the years pass, and Betta’s murder goes unsolved, the Ansaldo family fractures under the weight of their loss. When Miriam meets Leo, a sweet-natured young man with a dark past, their romance seems to turn her life around. But when Leo starts to pull loose the threads of Betta’s story, determined to find out what really happened, his search for the truth risks unraveling everything.