Alma

Federica Manzon's novel, a finalist for the 2024 Campiello Prize, is the story of Alma, a journalist who after many years returns to Trieste, where she was born and raised. A border city, a crossroads of personal stories and populations, with its own identity that comes from its tangle of cultures. The book traces the geography of the protagonist's memory, following paths that move between the past of her memories and the present, in the three days before Orthodox Easter. A journey in which Alma travels back in time to understand who her father was, a mysterious man who worked for Marshal Tito, a fleeting figure who appeared and disappeared on his journeys to the beyond, to the world of the "s'ciavi", a derogatory dialect term for Slavs, as the inhabitants of former Yugoslavia are called. A world she wasn't a part of, full of undisclosed secrets, because, according to her father, some things are better left unknown. It's the things of the present that count, not those of the past. One day, Vili, a Serbian boy, the son of regime dissidents who fled Belgrade, also arrives from this “other” world. Alma and Vili grow up together, first stepsiblings, then friends, lovers and adversaries. Their lives are separated for many years, until they are reunited in Belgrade during the Balkan war, only to be reunited in Trieste, where Vili has received the inheritance that Alma must collect. Alma

Federica Manzon
Feltrinelli, 2024