One unidentified skeleton. Three missing men. A village full of secrets. The best-selling author of The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna brings us a sparkling--by turns funny and moving--novel about a young American woman turned amateur detective in a small village in Southern Italy (Terrific -Boston Globe).

Calabria, 1960. Francesca Loftfield, a twenty-seven-year-old, starry-eyed American, arrives in the isolated mountain village of Santa Chionia tasked with opening a nursery school. There is no road, no doctor, no running water or electricity. And thanks to a recent flood that swept away the post office, there's no mail, either.

Most troubling, though, is the human skeleton that surfaced after the flood waters receded. Who is it? And why don't the police come and investigate? When the local priest's housekeeper begs Francesca to help determine if the remains are those of her long-missing son, Francesca begins to ask a lot of inconvenient questions. As an outsider, she might be the only person who can uncover the truth. Or she might be getting in over her head. As she attempts to juggle a nosy landlady, a suspiciously dashing shepherd, and a network of local families bound together by a code of silence, Francesca finds herself forced to choose between the charitable mission that brought her to Santa Chionia, and her future happiness, between truth and survival.

Set in the wild heart of Calabria, a land of sheer cliff faces, ancient tradition, dazzling sunlight--and one of the world's most ruthless criminal syndicates--The Lost Boy of Santa Chionia is a suspenseful puzzle mystery, a captivating romance, and an affecting portrait of a young woman in search of a meaningful life.

Poe and Kafka meet The Twilight Zone in this anthology of fifty fantastical tales, many of them reflecting the political and social energies of the time, by an Italian master of the short story.

Dino Buzzati was a prolific writer of stories, publishing several hundred over the course of forty years. Many of them are fantastic--reminiscent of Kafka and Poe in their mixture of horror and absurdity, and at the same time anticipating the alternate realities of The Twilight Zone or Black Mirror in their chilling commentary on the barbarities, catastrophes, and fanaticisms of the twentieth century.

In The Bewitched Bourgeois, Lawrence Venuti has put together an anthology that showcases Buzzati's short fiction from his earliest stories to the ones he wrote in the last months of his life. Some appear in English for the first time, while others are reappearing in Venuti's crisp new versions, such as the much-anthologized Seven Floors, an absurdist tale of a patient fatally caught in hospital bureaucracy; Panic at La Scala, in which the Milanese bourgeoisie, fearing a left-wing revolution, find themselves imprisoned in the opera house; and Appointment with Einstein, where the physicist, stopping at a filling station in Princeton, New Jersey, encounters a gas station attendant who turns out to be the Angel of Death.

From the National Book Award Finalist Domenico Starnone comes a new novel about childhood, memory, obsession, and the fictions we live by.

Children can be cruel, and children can love as passionately and obsessively as adults. These two observations combine, igniting the imagination of Italy's greatest contemporary novelist and producing a seemingly candid novel that belies remarkable psychological depths and infinite degrees of enchantment.

Imagine a child, a daydreamer, one of those boys who is always gazing out windows. His adoring grandmother, busy in the kitchen, keeps an eye on him. The child stares at the building opposite, watching a black-haired girl as she dances recklessly on her balcony. He is in love. And a love like this can push a child to extremes. He can become an explorer or a cabin boy, a cowboy or castaway; he can fight duels to the death, or even master unfamiliar languages. His grandmother has told him about the entrance to the underworld, and he knows the story of Orpheus's failed rescue mission. He could do better, he thinks; he wouldn't fail to bring that dark-haired up from the underground if she were dead, and it only he had the chance.

A short, sharp, perfectly styled and unforgettable novel about love, desire, memory, and death by the Strega Prize-winning Italian author of Ties and International Booker Prize-longlisted author of The House on Via Gemito.

Two stories converge in the aftermath of the devastating 1908 earthquake in Sicily and Calabria: a young woman sees a chance to avoid her impending arranged marriage and a boy manages to escape from the influence of an abusive mother on the verge of madness.

This new award-winning novel is from Nadia Terranova, author of Farewell Ghosts, a finalist for the 2019 Premio Strega, and is translated by Ann Goldstein, who also was the translator of Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan quartet.

There is something stronger than pain, and that is habit. Eleven-year-old Nicola knows this well. Each night he is tied up in the cellar by his mother, the wife of Calabria's biggest bergamot producer. There he waits for the sun to rise, and with it a sliver of freedom. On the other side of the sea, Barbara has just arrived in Messina and plans to escape her father, who pulls her towards marriage with a man she does not love. Liberty will be granted to both, but it will come at a very high price.

On December 28th, 1908, the earth shakes. Europe's most devastating earthquake razes the cities of Messina and Reggio Calabria and, along with them, everything Nicola and Barbara have known. From the ruins, each must piece back together a life and start anew. Written in Nadia Terranova's distinctively lyric style, The Night Trembles is a melancholic ode to human resilience and the promise of the unknown.

Mr. Palomar, whose name purposely evokes that of the famous telescope, is a seeker after knowledge, a visionary in a world sublime and ridiculous. Whether contemplating a cheese, a woman's breasts, or a gorilla's behavior, he brings us a vision of a world familiar by consensus, fragmented by the burden of individual perception. Translated by William Weaver. A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book

A glory-starved soldier spends his life awaiting an absent, long-expected enemy in this influential Italian classic of existentialism, now newly translated and with its originally intended title restored.

At the start of Dino Buzzati's The Stronghold, newly commissioned officer Giovanni Drogo has just received his first posting: the remote Fortezza Bastiani. North of this stronghold are impassable mountains; to the south, a great desert; and somewhere out there is the enemy, whose attack is imminent.

This is the enemy that Lieutenant Drogo has been sent to draw out of his lair, to defeat once and for all, returning home in triumph. And yet time passes, and where is the enemy?

As the soldiers in the fortress await the foretold day of reckoning, they succumb to inertia, and though death occurs, it is not from bravery. Decades pass. A lifetime passes. Drogo, however, still has his lonely vigil to keep.

Buzzati is one of the great Italian writers of the twentieth century, renowned for his fantastical imagination and for a touch that is as lyrical as it is light. The Stronghold, previously translated as The Tartar Steppe, is his most celebrated work, a book that has been read as a veiled attack on Mussolini's fascist militarism, a prophetic allegory of the Cold War, and an existentialist fable.

Lawrence Venuti's new translation reverts to the title that Buzzati originally intended to give his book, and seeks to bring out both the human and the historical dimensions of a story of proven power and poignancy.

A thrilling Sicilian saga about the legendary secret sect purported to be forerunners of the Mafia, translated into English for the first time.

Emerging from the dark streets and subterranean caves of Palermo, the Beati Paoli, masked and hooded, mete out their own form of justice to counter the unfettered power and privilege wielded by the aristocracy. For the voiceless, weak, and oppressed, the Beati Paoli are defenders and heroes. Reminiscent of a Dumas novel, Sicilian Avengers is a vibrant, atmospheric fresco of early eighteenth-century Palermo. Onto the stage of the ancient city, Blasco da Castiglione, a bold, brash, orphan adventurer, arrives on a quest to discover his origins and seek his destiny. But this fearless, swashbuckling D'Artagnan-esque hero unwittingly gets caught up in a devious and murderous succession plot involving a powerful noble family. When the Beati Paoli hear about this plot to usurp a rightful inheritance, they spring into action. Their shadowy machinations entangle the charismatic Blasco, who crosses paths with a cast of characters that test his loyalty and resolve in the pursuit of his true identity. The historical accuracy of the novel is complemented by the most meticulous description of Sicily's capital city ever written. Action-packed and laced with intrigue and chivalrous duels, Sicilian Avengers is a tale of love and hatred, friendship and betrayal, suffering and retribution. As French critic Jean Noël Schifano said, Natoli's novel is the fifth historical monument of contemporary Italian literature. Book 1 of 2 that includes an afterword by Umberto Eco.

After all, the Moscarda he believed himself to be was different when he was alone, or with his wife, his tenant, or his friends. And there were hundreds--no, thousands--of additional Moscardas in the minds of everyone who had met or heard of him.

Moscarda grappled with this new knowledge: that he was not who he thought he was, nor who anyone else thought he was. And the people around him? They were not who he thought they were either.

So he decided, in his own words, to ...find out who I was, at least to those closest to me, acquaintances so-called, and to amuse myself by maliciously decomposing the I that I was to them. What follows is a series of experiments, meant to befuddle and confuse those around him and prove that he was not, in fact, who they believed him to be.

Written by Nobel Laureate Luigi Pirandello over the course of 15 years, One, None, and One Hundred Thousand was a groundbreaking look at the nature of identity and the self.

Pirandello was no stranger to reinvention and loss of identity. Born into a well-to-do Sicilian family, he seemed destined to follow his father into business as a sulfur merchant. Instead, he spent his youth writing stories, and later excelled in literary studies.

Pirandello's early writing and teaching at the Istituto Superiore di Magistero di Roma was sufficient to support himself, his wife, and his three children--supplemented by an allowance from his father and his wife's dowry.

But in 1903, the family was ruined when the sulfur mines his father had invested in were flooded and destroyed. The family fortune was gone, including his wife's dowry. The news so shocked her that she suffered a complete mental collapse. In the aftermath, she suffered from hallucinations and anxieties that would follow her for the rest of her life.

At first, with an ailing wife and no money, Pirandello contemplated suicide. Instead, he redoubled his efforts. He took on more teaching work and wrote at a furious pace. He would go on to write 7 novels, numerous short stories, poetry, and around 40 plays throughout his career.

The issue of identity comes up again and again in Pirandello's work. In his play To Clothe the Naked, the protagonist tries to reinvent herself, with each subsequent identity stripped away from her by others. In The Life I Gave You, a mother is confronted with the truth that her long-lost son is not the person that she has created in her mind. In the end, she chooses to adhere to her fiction rather than face the facts about her son.

In Six Characters in Search of an Author, Pirandello's most famous work, six unused and incomplete characters walk onto a stage and demand that a director and his actors tell their stories. But of course, the lines between reality and invention are blurred, getting more absurd as the play goes on. This play created such a stir on opening night in Rome that fighting broke out in the audience, forcing Pirandello to flee the theater with his daughter. Later that year, the same play would be hailed by critics in Milan as a work of genius.

Pirandello's work was later seen as a precursor to the Theatre of the Absurd, in which writers explore the meaninglessness of human existence through deliberately confusing situations and purposeless dialogue.

By the time of his death in 1936, Pirandello was a well-known and respected writer in the theater and literary worlds. Although his name wouldn't be recognized by many today, his contributions to literature can be seen in the later work of notable writers like Jean-Paul Sartre and fellow Nobel Prize winner Samuel Beckett, among others.

Following two outcasts' tumultuous friendship, this brilliant, Strega Prize-winning novel captures the probing, passionate nature of a generation of global citizens, exploring sexuality and identity.

I never understood, of the two of us, which one was warm and which cold, but I consider myself lucky to have met my opposite front in Claudia Fanelli, the spatriata, the name people around here use for the uncertain, the odd, the unclassifiable and sometimes the shiftless or orphans, as well as unmarried men or women, vagrants and vagabonds, or even, in the case that concerns us, the emancipated.

Claudia enters Francesco's life on a sunny morning, in the school's entrance hall: it's a bolt of lightning, the birth of an entirely new kind of desire, which is, above all, the desire for life. Claudia is peerless and self-assured, extravagant; Francesco is introverted, burning with erotic curiosity, dominated by rustic faith, uncertain. She provokes him: Did you know that your mother and my father were lovers? But in the eyes of that meek boy, she glimpses a spark of rebellion: she sees herself in him. They become adults together, in a symbiotic game of escape and pursuit, in which they always end up finding each other.

Mario Desiati captures the complexities of a fluid, uprooted generation: his own. A generation around forty years old today, who weren't afraid to stray far from home to find their place in the world, who truly feel like citizens of Europe. With a poetic yet biting style, capable of great tenderness, Desiati depicts the myriad forms that desire can assume when given free rein. Without any fear of plucking the chords of romanticism, without any false modesty as he delves into the coarsest details of sensuality and instinct.

The Beati Paoli's unrelenting campaign to restore justice is compromised by an act of betrayal and a plot that threatens its very existence. Set against the backdrop of the island's increasing disillusionment with its new rulers from Savoy and a yearning for the return of the formerly detested Spanish monarchy, book two of Sicilian Avengers continues as the future of the House of Albamonte hangs in the balance and the survival of the Beati Paoli is threatened. Shifting allegiances, brutal reprisals, tortures, and kidnappings occur as the Beati Paoli's efforts to restore a usurped patrimony to its rightful owner is compromised by an act of betrayal. As they race to complete their mission, they must also thwart the diabolical plans of the villainous Don Raimondo and the evil Matteo Lo Vecchio, and deal with the wavering loyalty of one of the sect's newest recruits. Blasco de Castiglione finally discovers his true identity, which tests his sense of justice, honor, and fidelity to the people he knows, trusts, and loves: Duke Don Raimondo, whom he has pledged to protect; the beautiful and alluring Donna Gabriella, who has captured his heart; his friend and protector, the enigmatic Coriolano della Floresta; and the young and naïve Violante, whose love is within reach yet out of bounds. Translated into English for the first time by Stephen Riggio, Luigi Natoli's saga brings early eighteenth-century Palermo into vivid relief, where Sicilian aristocrats enjoy their soirees and luxuries while the poor and destitute scrounge for food in the dark and filthy streets. Nowhere is the contrast more shocking and wrenching than in the scrupulous depiction of the auto-da-fé. Readers will become immersed in a Sicily that is long gone but whose glorious and troubled past echoes in these pages. As French critic Jean Noël Schifano said, Natoli's novel is the fifth historical monument of contemporary Italian literature. Book 2 of 2 includes an afterword by Umberto Eco.

The painter's unpublished novel, an account of the misadventures of his autobiographical hero--a painter who wanders, dreams, remembers, frets, polemicizes, and tells stories. Translated from the Italian for the first time into English.

Seized my heart Caroline James, author of The Cruise

Charming Alka Joshi, author of the NYT bestselling The Henna Artist

Uplifting Suzanne Leal, author of The Watchful Wife

With the help of a feisty hotel owner, an attractive water-taxi driver, and a gondola full of Italians who call Venice home, Amelia, a widowed Australian, begins her search for serenity. As the island city works its magic, she comes to realize her life has been overshadowed by her famous American husband, Leo, well before his decline into Alzheimer's.

As Amelia navigates Venice's winding canals and its language, she gracefully confronts the joys and challenges of aging, discovering that love and laughter can come at any stage of life. Balancing long-distance parenting and familial obligations, she redefines what it means to live fully as an older woman, all while the magical city slowly helps her reclaim her identity.

Finding Serenissima is a heartwarming tale of second chances, exploring the complexities of long marriage, independence, and rediscovering love in the most unexpected places.

Set in Trieste, Italy, but spanning as far as Australia, Federica Marzi's meditation on emigration, loss, love, and identity weaves together a multigenerational story about how hard it can be to let the wounds of the past heal.

Against the summery backdrop of rugged Adriatic Sea coastline, Amila, a young Bosnian, and Norina, an elderly exile from the region of Istria in Croatia enter one another's lives. As a blooming youthful love forces Amila to keep secrets, the bitterness of another from decades earlier tears apart two sisters. In the forced and anticipated departures and arrivals that power My Home Somewhere Else, stories of emigration reveal just how much people share in common in their completely separate lives.

After all, the Moscarda he believed himself to be was different when he was alone, or with his wife, his tenant, or his friends. And there were hundreds--no, thousands--of additional Moscardas in the minds of everyone who had met or heard of him.

Moscarda grappled with this new knowledge: that he was not who he thought he was, nor who anyone else thought he was. And the people around him? They were not who he thought they were either.

So he decided, in his own words, to ...find out who I was, at least to those closest to me, acquaintances so-called, and to amuse myself by maliciously decomposing the I that I was to them. What follows is a series of experiments, meant to befuddle and confuse those around him and prove that he was not, in fact, who they believed him to be.

Written by Nobel Laureate Luigi Pirandello over the course of 15 years, One, None, and One Hundred Thousand was a groundbreaking look at the nature of identity and the self.

Pirandello was no stranger to reinvention and loss of identity. Born into a well-to-do Sicilian family, he seemed destined to follow his father into business as a sulfur merchant. Instead, he spent his youth writing stories, and later excelled in literary studies.

Pirandello's early writing and teaching at the Istituto Superiore di Magistero di Roma was sufficient to support himself, his wife, and his three children--supplemented by an allowance from his father and his wife's dowry.

But in 1903, the family was ruined when the sulfur mines his father had invested in were flooded and destroyed. The family fortune was gone, including his wife's dowry. The news so shocked her that she suffered a complete mental collapse. In the aftermath, she suffered from hallucinations and anxieties that would follow her for the rest of her life.

At first, with an ailing wife and no money, Pirandello contemplated suicide. Instead, he redoubled his efforts. He took on more teaching work and wrote at a furious pace. He would go on to write 7 novels, numerous short stories, poetry, and around 40 plays throughout his career.

The issue of identity comes up again and again in Pirandello's work. In his play To Clothe the Naked, the protagonist tries to reinvent herself, with each subsequent identity stripped away from her by others. In The Life I Gave You, a mother is confronted with the truth that her long-lost son is not the person that she has created in her mind. In the end, she chooses to adhere to her fiction rather than face the facts about her son.

In Six Characters in Search of an Author, Pirandello's most famous work, six unused and incomplete characters walk onto a stage and demand that a director and his actors tell their stories. But of course, the lines between reality and invention are blurred, getting more absurd as the play goes on. This play created such a stir on opening night in Rome that fighting broke out in the audience, forcing Pirandello to flee the theater with his daughter. Later that year, the same play would be hailed by critics in Milan as a work of genius.

Pirandello's work was later seen as a precursor to the Theatre of the Absurd, in which writers explore the meaninglessness of human existence through deliberately confusing situations and purposeless dialogue.

By the time of his death in 1936, Pirandello was a well-known and respected writer in the theater and literary worlds. Although his name wouldn't be recognized by many today, his contributions to literature can be seen in the later work of notable writers like Jean-Paul Sartre and fellow Nobel Prize winner Samuel Beckett, among others.

Accomplished in his career but unaccomplished in love, a middle-aged architect is torn apart by his obsession with an enigmatic young woman in this delicately told story of desire and abjection by a titan of Italian literature.

Antonio Dorigo is a successful architect in Milan, nearing fifty, who has always been afraid of women. A regular at an upscale brothel for years, he mourns the lack of close female companionship in his life. One afternoon, the madam at the brothel introduces Tonio to a new girl, Laide. Tonio sees nothing especially remarkable about her, though it intrigues him that she dances at La Scala and also at a strip club, and yet in a very short time he becomes completely obsessed with her.

Laide leads Antonio on, confounds him, uses and humiliates him, treats him tenderly from time to time, lies to him, makes no apologies to him, and he loves her ever more. This helpless and hopeless love, he feels, is what he is, even as it prevents him from ever seeing Laide for who she is. Because Who is she? is the question at the heart of Buzzati's clear-eyed and darkly comic tale of infatuation.

Is A Love Affair a love story or is it a story of anything but love? Buzzati's novel, with its psychological subtleties, vivid cityscapes, unsettling comedy, and compassion, keeps the reader guessing till the end.

A New York Times Best Historical Fiction Book of 2023

Through the loves and losses of a middle-class family from Calabria, this heady, atmospheric saga retraces the history of twentieth-century Italy.

As a young man in the Seventies, Valentino leaves home in search of a better life. With age, he begins to feel an intense regret, a longing for the world and the people he left behind, which he might not be able to recover, even after returning.
Set in Magna Graecia, the sun-drenched land where ancient Greeks stopped in their travels and happily settled, now full of ruins, South takes us back to a time when notaries and lawyers were undiscussed authorities in small towns. Meet the Notaio, his lover Magda, a Polish countess and a spy, and delve into their love story in Naples; meet the Farmacista, owner of the first chemist's shop in town, his wife Lea, and their children; follow the paths where these lives cross, and Tamara, Mara for short, marries into the Notaio's family; get to know charming Uncle Giorgio, an extravagant loner, owner of two small Gauguins, and Gioacchino, the house ghost.
Servants, drivers, peasants fully devoted and bound to their masters enliven this tale of love and loss, war and peace, politics and power, told in an elegant, affecting prose that transports us through time and space.

The BRAND NEW instalment in bestselling author T. A. Williams' Armstrong and Oscar cozy mystery series!

A brand-new cozy crime series set in gorgeous Tuscany...It's murder in paradise!

An ex-con...

Private investigator Dan Armstrong is no stranger to working with criminals, but when he's approached for help by Bianca Moretti, he's on high alert. Bianca is intelligent and beautiful, and Dan likes her, but he also once sent her to prison...

A suspicious death...

Bianca explains that a guest has been found dead at her father's luxurious and private retreat on the beautiful Italian Riviera. The police are sure the death is accidental, but Bianca is convinced the man's been murdered. Dan's sure he can get to the bottom of things...as long as Bianca is telling him the whole truth.

A very revealing case!

But when Dan arrives at the resort, he's in for a shock. He finds that the place is a naturist retreat, and everybody is walking around stark naked! Dan is determined to discover the truth, but this is going to mean revealing a whole lot more of himself than he expected.

Can Dan sniff out the truth about this case before Oscar's cold wet nose causes havoc?

Praise for T.A. Williams!

The perfect combination of character, setting and plot, heralding an addictive new cozy mystery series! Bestselling author Debbie Young.

Watching unassuming detective Dan Armstrong weddle the truth out of folks is great fun. Highly Entertaining read! Bestselling author Kelly Oliver.

In the pages of Alain Elkann's latest novel, perhaps the most important book in his literary journey, the author takes on the challenge that is extreme brevity. Everything happens in one day because-as the author sees it-the dimensions of a story don't depend on its length. The tale of a brilliant bourgeois life becomes, brief as it is, a thriller. The narration is by turns ironic, comedic, realistic. And at times it grasps one with a noir-like wince, ensnaring itself in barely glimpsed fragments of the Shoah. -Furio Colombo, il Fatto Quotidiano

The BRAND NEW instalment in bestselling author T. A. Williams' Armstrong and Oscar cozy mystery series!

A brand-new cozy crime series set in gorgeous Tuscany...It's murder in paradise!

A secluded villa...

When Dan Armstrong is asked to provide security at a private villa on the outskirts of Pisa, he's pretty sure it will be an easy job. Villa Gregory is remote; the gathered guests are rich - what could possibly go wrong?

A glittering gathering...

Inside the high walls of the palatial villa, Dan discovers the gathered guests are some of the most powerful tycoons in the media world, with plans for world domination. With so much at stake, Dan redoubles his efforts to keep everyone safe.

A detective under pressure?

But when one of the group is found murdered, Dan's heart sinks - especially considering Anna's own daughter is in the frame! When the police arrive, Dan meets formidable Inspector Adolfo Vinci, a man whose main talent seems to be for getting things wrong. It all goes from bad to worse for Dan as the man from the Leaning Tower starts leaning on him.

It's another case for Dan and Oscar to solve and this one won't be easy!

A gripping new murder mystery series by bestselling author T.A. Williams, perfect for fans of Lee Strauss and Beth Byers.

Praise for T.A. Williams!

The perfect combination of character, setting and plot, heralding an addictive new cozy mystery series! Bestselling author Debbie Young.

Watching unassuming detective Dan Armstrong weddle the truth out of folks is great fun. Highly Entertaining read! Bestselling author Kelly Oliver.

One of Alain Elkann's most intimate books, this is a story told through diary entries that lovingly and demurely investigate his mother's illness and death. From the warning signs of illness to the traumatic experience of the intensive care unit to the closing moments of the funeral, these are memories that emerge as simple and precise, highlighting a son's rebellion and helplessness in the face of his mother's demise. This is a meditation on death and it's ability to still catch us unprepared, leaving behind a void that even time is never able to fill.