– published by Marsilio, the most beautiful and intense novel by a writer who once again shows how he can brilliantly combine lucid, melancholy autobiography writing with an authentic sense of history. The first scene unfolds inside a family home in the late 1970s, in a small town in the south of Italy. The mother a schoolteacher, and the father too, with a love of organising cultural encounters. The announcement of the birth of a little sister turns on its head the world of a little boy who is as sensitive as he is filled with a feeling of marginalisation by the new arrival. He finds refuge in a long, obstinate silence. But then he slowly, and wearily, begins to reacquire the word, through books, until at last, in the pages he has read and written, he finds the true, profound meaning of his destiny. All the way to his arrival in Milan, and university, and the revelation of publishing.