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Italian Collection
For lovers of Italy, we’ve put together our first novels that get under the skin of Italian life and culture through these three unforgettable stories.
Included in this bundle are:
THE DUKE - by Matteo Melchiorre and translated by Antonella Lettieri
In the tradition of a 19th-century epic — in a compelling twenty-first-century light
Outside Vallorgana, a tiny, isolated village high in the foothills of the Dolomites, the ‘Duke’ lives in the villa of his aristocratic ancestors. The last in the centuries’ old line of the Cimamontes, he spends his days on his land and absorbed in the family archive, tolerated, if gently ridiculed by the villagers who are his neighbours. When he finds out that the village big man is taking timber from his land, he has a decision to make. Will he stay in his glorious, cerebral isolation, or will he honour his ancestral blood and take action against this affront?
Matteo Melchiorre’s portrait of the idiosyncratic character of the Duke and the world of Valorgana is a sweeping feat of literary imagination. With the pace, panorama and plot twists of a great nineteenth-century classic, the breathless story of the Duke’s ensuing feud unfolds, asking some big twenty-first century questions about our relationships with privilege, the past, the natural world and each other.
THE LITTLE I KNEW - by Chiara Valerio and translated by Ailsa Wood
The secrets and silences of women’s lives in a Roman seaside town
In Scauri, an end of the line seaside town forty miles or so from Rome, Vittoria dies unexpectedly in her bath. Whilst the townsfolk meet the event with sad but respectful southern Italian silence, Lea, the town lawyer, wants to investigate. Who was Vittoria, what were her secrets, why had she mysteriously arrived in Scauri thirty years earlier? And was her relationship with Lea all that it seemed?
In this unforgettable portrait of a small town and the women who live there, reverberations from the past catch up with present. Through the silences, Vittoria’s story is revealed and everything - passions, emotions, and relationships - changes forever.
Novelist, editor, critic, cultural commentator and mathematician Chiara Valerio is a sensation in Italy and The Little I Knew is a huge bestseller. It was shortlisted for the 2024 Premio Strega.
YOUR LITTLE MATTER - by Maria Grazia Calandrone and translated by Antonella Lettieri
A devastating story of motherhood, abandonment and the real lives of women in Sixties Italy. Non-fiction Ferrante.
Rome 1965. A man and a woman, excluded from Italian society, abandon their eight month old daughter in the Villa Borghese and take extreme action. In 2021, that child, author Maria Grazia Calandrone, sets out to discover the truth of what took place, examining the places that her mother lived, suffered, worked and loved.
Your Little Matter is an intimate reconstruction of the life of a parent, a shocking insight into the real lives of marginalised women from the Italian South in the relatively recent past, and the revelation of a cause celebre that was a catalyst for the legalisation of divorce in Italy. Combining poetic insight with cool, journalistic investigation, the completely personal with the very public, the book tells a devastating story of how the institutionalised callousness of state and society can lead to tragedy.
For lovers of Italy, we’ve put together our first novels that get under the skin of Italian life and culture through these three unforgettable stories.
Included in this bundle are:
THE DUKE - by Matteo Melchiorre and translated by Antonella Lettieri
In the tradition of a 19th-century epic — in a compelling twenty-first-century light
Outside Vallorgana, a tiny, isolated village high in the foothills of the Dolomites, the ‘Duke’ lives in the villa of his aristocratic ancestors. The last in the centuries’ old line of the Cimamontes, he spends his days on his land and absorbed in the family archive, tolerated, if gently ridiculed by the villagers who are his neighbours. When he finds out that the village big man is taking timber from his land, he has a decision to make. Will he stay in his glorious, cerebral isolation, or will he honour his ancestral blood and take action against this affront?
Matteo Melchiorre’s portrait of the idiosyncratic character of the Duke and the world of Valorgana is a sweeping feat of literary imagination. With the pace, panorama and plot twists of a great nineteenth-century classic, the breathless story of the Duke’s ensuing feud unfolds, asking some big twenty-first century questions about our relationships with privilege, the past, the natural world and each other.
THE LITTLE I KNEW - by Chiara Valerio and translated by Ailsa Wood
The secrets and silences of women’s lives in a Roman seaside town
In Scauri, an end of the line seaside town forty miles or so from Rome, Vittoria dies unexpectedly in her bath. Whilst the townsfolk meet the event with sad but respectful southern Italian silence, Lea, the town lawyer, wants to investigate. Who was Vittoria, what were her secrets, why had she mysteriously arrived in Scauri thirty years earlier? And was her relationship with Lea all that it seemed?
In this unforgettable portrait of a small town and the women who live there, reverberations from the past catch up with present. Through the silences, Vittoria’s story is revealed and everything - passions, emotions, and relationships - changes forever.
Novelist, editor, critic, cultural commentator and mathematician Chiara Valerio is a sensation in Italy and The Little I Knew is a huge bestseller. It was shortlisted for the 2024 Premio Strega.
YOUR LITTLE MATTER - by Maria Grazia Calandrone and translated by Antonella Lettieri
A devastating story of motherhood, abandonment and the real lives of women in Sixties Italy. Non-fiction Ferrante.
Rome 1965. A man and a woman, excluded from Italian society, abandon their eight month old daughter in the Villa Borghese and take extreme action. In 2021, that child, author Maria Grazia Calandrone, sets out to discover the truth of what took place, examining the places that her mother lived, suffered, worked and loved.
Your Little Matter is an intimate reconstruction of the life of a parent, a shocking insight into the real lives of marginalised women from the Italian South in the relatively recent past, and the revelation of a cause celebre that was a catalyst for the legalisation of divorce in Italy. Combining poetic insight with cool, journalistic investigation, the completely personal with the very public, the book tells a devastating story of how the institutionalised callousness of state and society can lead to tragedy.