The Foundation recommends

Breaktime Is Over

Marcello Gori, a thirty-year-old from Viareggio, is stranded in a state of existential drift, trapped in a kind of endless late adolescence from which he simply cannot break free. After spending the better part of a decade at university, he now hops from one precarious job to another, forever putting off life’s real decisions — including his relationship with Lucrezia, which he keeps sabotaging for fear of stepping into adulthood. While he treads water in this suspended state, something quite unforeseen happens: against all expectations, Marcello wins a doctoral scholarship at the University of Pisa under Professor Sacrosanti, a towering figure of Italian literature and a formidable academic baron. Marcello dreams of drafting a grand, sweeping thesis — one that explores Borges and Unamuno as readers of Don Quixote, or that binds together Gadda, Bolaño and Foster Wallace — but the professor advises him instead to devote himself to a minor Italian writer, Tito Sella, a former terrorist and once-promising author in the early 1980s. As Marcello plunges into his research, Tito gradually becomes a kind of alter ego, and the novel unfolds through the twin narratives of their lives, two worlds that cast a sharp light on Italy’s recent history. Dario Ferrari portrays both the years of terrorism in the country and the contemporary academic sphere with dry, biting humour, sometimes veering into the grotesque, and often coaxing a smile from the reader. Drawing on examples such as Borges and Cervantes, Ferrari also explores the metanarrative with the introduction of Sella’s supposed autobiography Fantasima, a novel within the novel. This is a lost work of doubtful existence that Marcello attempts to piece together from documents preserved in the author’s archives in Paris, retracing his life and the political struggle of the Ravachol brigade of which he was a member.

La ricreazione è finita
Dario Ferrari
Sellerio, 2023

Death at the Crossroads

The Edo period in Japan remains one of the most fascinating and mysterious eras in the nation’s history. A new Shogun has reunited the country, while the defeated samurai, now without masters, roam the land as ronin. One of these is Matsuyama Kaze — his name meaning “the wind of the pine woods” — a warrior without a homeland yet steadfast in his loyalty to his late lord. Bound by honour, Kaze sets out on a quest to fulfil a final promise to his lord’s wife: to find her missing daughter. His journey soon leads him to a puzzling crime — a man found dead at the crossroads of four roads. The murder is hastily pinned on the coalman who discovered the body, but Kaze’s keen eye instantly detects a whole series of contradictions. This novel is the first in a tetralogy that carefully weaves together various elements of detective fiction, historical narrative, comedy and swashbuckling Japanese adventure stories. Written for a Western audience fascinated by the land of the Rising Sun, Furutani’s works provide richly detailed historical and social reconstructions of the period, also with insights into its cuisine and everyday customs. Each chapter opens with a haiku, drawing the reader into the poetry that infuses every gesture and every story of this extraordinary world. <br> <br>   Agguato all'incrocio <br> Dale Furutani <br> William Morrow, 1988 <br>

The Queue at the Post Office

After "Chi dice e chi tace", Chiara Valerio takes us back to Scauri, on the border between Lazio and Campania. Lingering echoes of Vittoria still haunt this place, three years after her mysterious disappearance. Here, on the beaches where clams have lately begun to vanish mysteriously, we meet a lawyer, Lea Russo. On the very day she turns forty-three, Lea finds herself having to deal with a new and apparently straightforward murder case. A young girl, Agata Palmieri, has been found dead, and everyone is convinced that her mother, Giovanna, is guilty. As in her previous novel, the plot of this crime drama serves merely as a pretext. Once again, this is an existential exploration that delves into her characters’ inner worlds, exploring the intricate themes that surface through the story. It reflects on motherhood and care, but also on the weight one bears when devotion to another person becomes absolute and so consuming that one’s own sense of self begins to fade away. The quest for truth is, therefore, also a search for identity – particularly that of the women who appear in this story: mothers, nuns, daughters, the accused, and the investigators – each constrained by the tight social fabric of a small provincial town, yet always striving to break out of it. True to the tradition of Italian provincial detective stories, the town itself becomes a microcosm that reflects broader social complexities, and the queue at the post office turns into a scene of generational and social confrontation, where gossip and unspoken truths rise gently to the surface.

La fila alle poste
Chiara Valerio
Sellerio, 2025

The Bee Sting

The protagonists of Paul Murray’s novel are the Barnes family, who live in a small Irish village not far from the capital. Dickie, the father, is facing serious trouble at work, as the dealership he owns is on the brink of bankruptcy. This financial distress is tightly bound up with the private tensions of each member of the family, drawing them all into a kind of existential abyss. Dickie attempts to evade both his problems at work and his endless quarrels with his wife Imelda by devoting himself to the construction of a fallout bunker, while Imelda, once obsessed with amassing costly clothes, now tries to sell off the family’s jewellery and heirlooms. Cass, the eldest daughter, is in her final year at school and, with her friend Elaine, dreams of escape, hoping to enrol at Trinity College and going to live in Dublin. P.J., the youngest, is a gifted yet withdrawn boy who retreats into himself as a way of enduring the chaos at home. A mosaic of disconnected lives, and a breakdown in communication, the characters’ individual struggles reflect the wider anxieties of a society haunted by global emergencies such as climate change and the financial crash of 2008. Murray’s prose surges forward in a torrent of scenes and voices, almost devoid of punctuation, at times meandering slowly, at others crashing down upon the reader like a flash flood, before reaching an ending as enigmatic as it is unsettling.

The Bee Sting
Paul Murray
Macmillan, 2023