Family Bestiary

Lilith Moscon retraces her childhood in a book that’s part autobiography, part fairy tale, full of strange characters, who emerge from real people but are transformed into fairy-tale figures. In the novel, Lilith imagines herself as a little witch, her brother Gorkij is a troll, her mother a motorcyclist and her grandmother’s chickens are dinosaurs, direct descendants of T-Rex. It’s a story told in elegant, poetic words, where memories fade into dream and are coloured by the author’s fervid imagination, which reworks them into a fantastic tale, rounded off with wonderful illustrations by Francesco Chiacchio. Lilith’s memories go back to her grandparents’ chicken coop in a little village in Veneto, cross the stinking Po Valley to the rice fields of Piedmont, also linguistically shifting from one dialect to another, arriving in Berlin, where her adolescence comes to an end and a new phase of her life begins.

Bestiario familiare
Lilith Moscon; illustrazioni di Francesco Chiacchio
Topipittori, 2022