**BUSTLE BEST BOOK OF THE WEEK PICKNAMED A BOOKSHOP.ORG RECOMMENDED READING OF THE SEASONIn this charming, deeply atmospheric novel set against the Amalfi Coast of the 1950s, two women form an intense and lasting friendship that embodies the paradoxes of Italian society.**Inspired by her own adventurous, unconventional life, actress and writer Goliarda Sapienza’s recently rediscovered novel takes the reader to the sun-drenched town of Positano in southern It...

**A breathtakingly beautiful novel about the first 4 years and last 4 months of a great love, by a “lacerating, luminous” Italian author (Jhumpa Lahiri, author of Interpreter of Maladies)Perfect for fans of short, razor-sharp modern literary classics like Annie Ernaux and Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking**Upon the death of her husband, Innocenzo Monti, Lalla Romano sought to distil the essence of their long life together. The result was In Fa...

A lonely little boy's unlikely friendship with his grandparents' grizzled old groundskeeper leads him down the rabbit hole from a life lived solely in books to a wonderful and terrifying hell of long-buried secrets, shadowy partisans, murdered Nazis, thefts, lies, doppelgängers, bloodthirsty slugs, and the unquiet dead.

Long before the latest vogue for autofiction, Michele Mari, one of Italy's most beloved authors, cast his mind back to the days of his own childhood, and found it crawling with monsters. Raised on comic books and science fiction, the young Mari constructed an alternate universe for himself untouched by uncomprehending grownups or sadistic peers. Compared to the horrors of real life, Long John Silver and Cthulhu made for positively cuddly company; but little boys raised by beasts may well g...

**“I was struck straightaway by the singular force of her taut, meditative, sorrowful writing.” -- Jhumpa LahiriA diamond-sharp, Italian classic about the mysterious relationships between two partisan couples in German-occupied Italy in the wintry mountains of PiemonteThis hauntingly beautiful, sharply modern novel of WWII is perfect for fans of Tove Ditlevsen, Rachel Cusk, and Lucia Berlin**Translated into English for the first time, A Silence Shared is a ...

In this charming, deeply atmospheric novel set against the Amalfi Coast of the 1950s, two women form an intense and lasting friendship that embodies the paradoxes of Italian society.Inspired by her own adventurous, unconventional life, actress and writer Goliarda Sapienza's recently rediscovered novel takes the listener to the sun-drenched town of Positano in southern Italy. There, while working on a film, Goliarda encounters the captivating Erica, a beautiful wido...