Books from Italy

Able God is a bright young Nigerian man with an engineering degree, a love of chess, and hopes for a better future. But instead of building the life he imagined, he works long hours delivering room service at a luxury hotel, serving wealthy guests while struggling to make ends meet. When an encounter with a powerful and dangerous hotel guest turns violent, Able God finds himself caught in a situation that leaves him with few options. Fearing the consequences, he flees Nigeria and joins a group of migrants travelling across the Sahara toward Europe. Led by a charismatic religious figure, the travellers embark on a perilous journey through Niger and Libya, hoping to reach a place where they can begin again. Instead, they encounter human traffickers, starvation, exploitation, and violence. As survival becomes his only priority, Able God is forced to question his beliefs about morality, faith, and the possibility of a better life. In The Road to the Salt Sea, Samuel Kolawole offers a powerful portrait of migration, exposing the human cost of inequality and the desperate choices made by those seeking safety and opportunity beyond their homeland.

Domenico Starnone is an Italian novelist, screenwriter, and journalist, born in 1943 in Naples. Before establishing himself as a novelist, he worked as a teacher and wrote for newspapers and satirical publications, often drawing on his experiences in the Italian education system. His fiction is known for its psychological precision, sharp humour, and exploration of the tensions underlying family relationships, marriage, and personal identity. Starnone frequently examines how people construct narratives about themselves and others, revealing the contradictions between memory, truth, and self-deception. His notable works include Ties, Trick, and The House on Via Gemito, which won the prestigious Strega Prize in 2001. His writing often combines intimate domestic conflicts with broader reflections on social expectations, masculinity, ageing, and artistic ambition. Internationally acclaimed for his subtle, layered storytelling, Starnone has become an important voice in contemporary Italian literature.

Can you walk away from your family and never look back? Ten years after cutting all contact with his parents, an unnamed narrator reflects on the childhood and family life he left behind. His father ruled the household through violence, intimidation, and fear, while his mother quietly endured her husband’s control, gradually disappearing into the background of her own life. As the narrator revisits these painful memories, he begins to understand the cost of silence and the complicated ties that bind children to their parents. Both an intimate family portrait and a sharp critique of patriarchal power, The Anniversary asks whether breaking away from those who raised us is an act of betrayal—or a necessary step toward freedom.

Jess Capodimonte Baratta has spent much of her life putting everyone else first. Recently divorced, she retreats to her parents’ basement in Lake Como, New Jersey, where family obligations and Sunday dinners leave little room for her own ambitions. A talented draftswoman working in her uncle’s marble business, Jess has more potential than she realizes—but an unexpected family loss brings buried secrets to light and forces her to question everything she thought she knew about the people closest to her. Determined to reclaim her future, Jess travels to her ancestral home in Carrara, Italy, where the marble mountains of Tuscany and the vibrant streets of Milan offer the possibility of a fresh start. As she explores her family’s past and meets Angelo Strazza, an artist who works in gold, Jess begins to discover her own creative gifts and a new sense of belonging. Blending romance, family drama, and Italian-American heritage, this warm, spirited novel explores the courage it takes to reinvent yourself and build a life on your own terms.

In June 1934, Anna arrives with her husband, Carlo, in the small southern Italian village of Lizzanello, in the sun-soaked region of Salento. An outsider from northern Italy, she stands apart from the village women: she reads unconventional books, refuses to follow traditional expectations, and believes women deserve the same rights as men. When the local post office begins hiring, Anna seizes the opportunity to become the village’s first female letter carrier—a decision that challenges deeply rooted social conventions. As she delivers letters carrying news of love, separation, longing, and loss, Anna gradually becomes an essential thread connecting the community. Yet beneath the village’s familiar rhythms lie forbidden desires, old resentments, and family secrets that threaten to change several lives forever. Inspired by the author’s own great-grandmother, this sweeping historical novel explores a woman’s determination to shape her own destiny in a world that expects her to conform.

In Perfection, Anna and Tom are a young creative couple living in Berlin, where they enjoy a carefully curated lifestyle of remote work, minimalist interiors, cultural experiences, and seemingly effortless happiness. Surrounded by the aesthetics of contemporary urban life, they appear to have achieved the freedom and fulfillment they desire. Yet beneath their polished routines lies a growing sense of emptiness and dissatisfaction. Through precise, detached prose, Vincenzo Latronico examines the contradictions of digital nomadism, gentrification, consumer culture, and the pursuit of an ideal life shaped by social media. The novel offers a sharp portrait of a generation caught between the desire for authenticity and the pressure to make every aspect of life look perfect.

In One, None, and a Hundred Grand, Vitangelo Moscarda discovers that his wife sees his nose as slightly crooked, a detail he has never noticed himself. This seemingly trivial observation triggers an existential crisis as he realizes that everyone perceives him differently, creating countless versions of his identity. As he attempts to escape these conflicting images, he begins to question the nature of selfhood, reality, and social identity. Through absurdity and philosophical reflection, Pirandello explores the instability of personal identity and the impossibility of truly knowing oneself through the eyes of others.

Set in Sicily in 1153, A Sultan in Palermo explores a fascinating period when Norman rulers governed an island deeply shaped by Arab and Muslim culture. Palermo is a flourishing centre of learning, where Arabic language and intellectual traditions remain influential despite the political dominance of Christian rulers. At the heart of the novel is Muhammad al-Idrisi, a celebrated Muslim cartographer and scholar, who serves King Roger II of Sicily, known to his Muslim subjects as Sultan Rujari. As Idrisi navigates his friendship with the ageing ruler, he becomes increasingly torn between loyalty to the royal court and solidarity with fellow Muslims who are resisting Norman rule or preparing to leave the island. Surrounded by political intrigue, religious tensions, and personal desires, he must confront the moral compromises of life under an increasingly unstable regime. Blending historical figures with imaginative storytelling, Tariq Ali explores cultural coexistence, the struggle for power, and the fragile relationship between political authority and personal conscience. The novel is the fourth book in Ali’s Islam Quintet.

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.

The first volume of Antonio Moresco’s ambitious Games of Eternity trilogy, The Beginnings is an experimental, dreamlike novel that follows an unnamed protagonist through three distinct stages of life: seminarian, political revolutionary, and aspiring writer. Moving through the upheavals of twentieth-century Italy, the protagonist struggles to find his place in a world shaped by religious institutions, ideological movements, and the elusive possibilities of literature. Rather than following a conventional narrative, Moresco creates a shifting, surreal world in which events unfold with strange immediacy and familiar realities become unsettling. The novel challenges traditional storytelling, offering an unusual exploration of transformation, rebellion, and the search for artistic identity. Both philosophical and unpredictable, it marks the beginning of a literary journey that pushes the boundaries of contemporary Italian fiction.

Tangerinn follows Mina, a thirty-year-old woman who has built a carefully controlled life in London in an attempt to escape her past. When her Moroccan-born father, Omar, dies unexpectedly, she returns to her childhood home in Calabria, southern Italy, intending to attend his funeral. Instead, she finds herself staying longer than planned, drawn back into the family and community she once left behind. Omar ran a small beach bar called the Tangerinn, a gathering place for migrants and outsiders who struggled to find acceptance in their new home. As Mina reconnects with the people who knew her father, she begins to uncover the complexities of his past and question how well she truly understood him. Her journey becomes an exploration of the parallels between their lives: both left home in search of something better, yet neither could entirely escape the pull of their origins. Moving between Italy, Morocco, and London, Anechoum explores migration, family inheritance, cultural identity, and the elusive meaning of belonging. The novel asks whether we can ever fully escape our past or whether understanding where we come from is essential to discovering who we are.