The Mortal and Immortal Life of the Girl from Milan
by Domenico Starnone
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Pub Date Oct 15 2024 | Archive Date Oct 15 2024
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Description
From the National Book Award Finalist Domenico Starnone comes a new novel about childhood, memory, obsession, and the fictions we live by.
Children can be cruel, and children can love as passionately and obsessively as adults. These two observations combine, igniting the imagination of Italy’s greatest contemporary novelist and producing a seemingly candid novel that belies remarkable psychological depths and infinite degrees of enchantment.
Imagine a child, a daydreamer, one of those boys who is always gazing out windows. His adoring grandmother, busy in the kitchen, keeps an eye on him. The child stares at the building opposite, watching a black-haired girl as she dances recklessly on her balcony. He is in love. And a love like this can push a child to extremes. He can become an explorer or a cabin boy, a cowboy or castaway; he can fight duels to the death, or even master unfamiliar languages. His grandmother has told him about the entrance to the underworld, and he knows the story of Orpheus’s failed rescue mission. He could do better, he thinks; he wouldn’t fail to bring that dark-haired up from the underground if she were dead, and it only he had the chance.
A short, sharp, perfectly styled and unforgettable novel about love, desire, memory, and death by the Strega Prize-winning Italian author of Ties and International Booker Prize-longlisted author of The House on Via Gemito.
A Note From the Publisher
- Readers of Elsa Morante, Elena Ferrante, Alba de Cespedes, Ian McEwan, Donna Tartt, Jonathan Franzen, Jhumpa Lahiri and other writers whose novels address society, class, politics and history through the matrix of family psychology and dynamics
- Ambitious and atmospheric contemporary Italian domestic page-turners, Domenico Starnone’s novels boast richly layered narratives and psychological depth but are always highly accessible and readable
- For readers looking for emotionally resonant, complex yet compact family dramas; a slim novel reminiscent of the work of Jhumpa Lahiri, Elizabeth Strout, and Elena Ferrante
KEY SELLING POINTS
- Strega Prize-winning author, a contemporary italian master
Previous recent titles by the same author have been: New York Times Editors Choice, shortlisted for the National Book Award, New York Times Notable Book of the Year, Sunday Times, Washington Post, and Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year, Winner of the 2015 Bridge Prize for Best Novel
- Atmosphere of working-class Naples (Italy) is very strong and beautifully rendered in the context of universal themes: family, love, loss, growing up
- New title by author coming in 2026
Advance Praise
“Domenico Starnone’s gift to shuffle and deal the cards of a story gets ever more impressive.”—La Stampa
“Faultless… The reflection on love, already undertaken in Ties, Trick and Trust, is resumed and refined.”—Reading in Translation
Praise for Domenico Starnone’s The House on Via Gemito
“Starnone...succeeds beautifully in exploiting Federì’s self-contradictions and the unreliability of memory to create what is both a complex family narrative and a masterpiece on the elusive nature of truth.”—Christopher Sorrentino, The New York Times
“Starnone is a writer exquisitely attuned to class anxieties: As his later novels do, Via Gemito explores the emotional cost of class mobility, and the psychic toll of changing one’s speech patterns and behavior for the sake of social and financial gain...In Starnone’s novels, releasing yourself from whatever bitterness consumed your parents is an ultimately futile pursuit.”—Idra Novey, The Atlantic
“A vivid, fluid, richly detailed drama, tormented and hilarious.”—Tim Parks, The Washington Post
“[The House on Via Gemito] presents a vivid rainbow of sediments: a boy’s initiations, with every antenna trembling, tuning in secrets of both family and neighborhood; and an evisceration of the creative life, exposing both how the world crushes its artists and how artists sabotage their own efforts; and all this erupts like Naples in full cry.”—John Domini, The Brooklyn Rail
“The House On Via Gemito is an exuberant portrait of the writer as a young (and then middle-aged) man, and an allegory of the role of the artist, adrift in the Sargasso of modernity.”—Hamilton Cain, On the Seawall
Praise for Trust
“A short, sharp novel that cuts like a scalpel to the core of its characters... Starnone has earned a reader’s trust with another agile analysis of frail humanity.”—Los Angeles Times
“Translation shows me how to work with new words, how to experiment with new styles and forms, how to take greater risks, how to structure and layer my sentences in different ways.”—Jhumpa Lahiri on the joy of translation as discovery, Lit Hub
“A sweeping examination of aging, love, and success... This is the third of Starnone’s novels that Lahiri has translated over the last six years, and her deft hand seamlessly reveals Starnone’s masterful narrative at every turn.”—Booklist
“Starnone (Trick) returns with an elegant story of a man’s lifelong struggle to perfect his public persona while hiding a secret.”—Publishers Weekly
Marketing Plan
Marketing & Publicity
- Print and E-galleys
- Author blurbs
- National Print and Online Coverage
- Profile pieces
- Submission to all major literary, translation prizes
- Social media campaign
- Digital Assets: e-card, book trailer
Available Editions
| EDITION | Paperback |
| ISBN | 9798889660477 |
| PRICE | $18.00 (USD) |
| PAGES | 144 |
