Senza titolo 2 - Grandi e Associati

FICTION
Sergio Grea, I signori della sete
Piemme, June 2009, 428 pages
It’s true – in Africa a life is only worth a few bucks
Nic Morgan’s life has been going to hell in a handbasket for months, now. His wife,
Lucy, died in a car accident. What’s even worse, she didn’t die alone – her lover was
driving the car at the time, and Nic found out about the affair only after it was too
late. Ever since he lost his wife, he’s found it next to impossible to focus on work. The
people in his company who covet his job as vice president in an important oil
multinational use that to bad-mouth him to his boss. Nic is sent away from San
Francisco to the Horn of Africa, where he encounters a red-hot situation – the
English on one side, the French on the other, and Islam everywhere. Neighbouring
countries are plotting to turn the area into a powder-keg. Guerrilla fighters kill their
enemies mercilessly. But it is also an uncontaminated part of the world, full of
natural resources its people, however, cannot access. That is how Nic understands
that this place can help him cope with the rage that is eating him up inside. Setting
up international cooperation projects can bring water back to those who’d had their
rights to it stolen. Nic suddenly feels useful again and finally forgets the past.
Sergio Grea was born in Genoa but lives in Milan. He is married with two children
and was a top executive in the oil business. Twenty years of experience in that field
inspired him to write I signori della sete. He has also published a number of novels
with Sperling & Kupfer, among which are Vorrei che fosse domani and Saigon,
addio.
Translation rights: Piemme
Gianni Morelli, Amori, altipiani e macchine parlanti
Garzanti, September 2009, 271 pages
A story of love, enchantment and freedom
Viani is looking for America and finds a dream. He leaves Italy for New York at the
beginning of the last century. He is only a young emigrant with a passion for music
and an enormous curiosity about ‘talking machines’, the first gramophones which
are flooding the market and allowing people to hear the voices of the great opera
singers, starting from Caruso. His journey takes him from the ballrooms of Buenos
Aires to the beach at Mar del Plata, to the vast expanses of Patagonia, to the shores of
Lake Titicaca and to Cuzco Square, to aristocratic palaces, haciendas, mule caravans,
fashionable cafés, highlands, mud hut villages, prairies, salons, tin mines…In his
voyage of self-discovery, Viani is guided not only by music, but also by his love for
three women: young Clara who travelled with him to the New World, Etta, temptress
and the bandit’s woman, and sensual Luz, whom he meets in Bolivia’s ancient
capital, Sucre…
Gianni Morelli. First chemistry, then physics and lasers, then geography and
historical seismology: University and the National Research Council. Then writing
and publishing: tourism, school texts, economics, cartography, and geography once
more. Long voyages of discovery and even longer sojourns abroad in various
countries, following a trail of cultural, historical and literary enticements. This all led
to books, articles, publishing projects, short stories, conference papers, conferences,
radio and TV interviews, university lectures. Not to mention being the editorial
director of ClupGuide, a famous line of travel books.
Laura Pugno, Quando verrai
Minimum fax, September 2009, 120 pages
A thrilling, cruel, elegant novel
Eva grew up without a father and lives in a trailer with her mother Leila. She’s a
teenager who lives on the fringes of legality among street vendors and illegal
immigrants, without any of the security of a normal middle-class life. As if the creepy
attention showed by her mother’s partner, Stasi, weren’t enough to deal with, Eva
comes briefly into contact with a mysterious vagabond who suffers from a strange
form of psoriasis all over his body, just as she does, and for which there seems to be
no cure. The encounter with this man makes her come to grips with the abilities
hiding behind what appears to be merely a physical problem. Eva can ‘see’ the death
of the people she comes into contact with… Quando verrai is an amazing narrative
tour de force, where the visionary power of manga melds perfectly with the
incredible appeal of a Bildungsroman.
Laura Pugno was born in Rome in 1970. She has published a novel, Sirene
(Einaudi 2007), a collection of short stories, Sleepwalking (Sironi 2002) and
collections of poems and theatre texts.
Translation rights: Minimum fax
Brunella Schisa, Dopo ogni abbandono
Garzanti, September 2009, 250 pages
Scandal, love and death in late 19th century Rome
A rainy November night, a pistol shot. A woman, still beautiful, wounded by her
young lover. This is Evelina Cattermole, one of the most fascinating and scandalous
women in Italy at the end of the 19th century. Scandal followed her from the day her
husband was killed in a duel defending her honor. She was hated and admired, a
journalist and writer in a male-dominated society, and becAme successful writing
under the pen-name Contessa Lara. That pistol shot roused the curiosity of an entire
country. Some considered Contessa Lara to be a free and independent woman, in her
work and in her love life, a paladin of emancipation and female freedom. For others,
she was a slut, not much more than a prostitute, a danger to the morals of society.
Dopo ogni abbandono is a fascinating novel hinting at the fate of every woman in
the mysterious fate of one woman.
Brunella Schisa is Neapolitan and writes for ‘Venerdì di Repubblica’. She edited
for Marsilio Le lettere di una monaca portoghese and for Einaudi Il teatro di
Raymond Roussel and Herculine Barbin. Una strana confessione. Her first novel,
La donna in nero (Garzanti 2007), has won a number of literary prizes.
Chiara Valerio, La gioia piccola d’esser quasi salvi
Nottetempo, September 2009, 140 pages
It’s impossible to be happy
Giulia’s legs dangle off the balcony and she loses a shoe. Marco watches Giulia’s
mother throw herself off, as if to go get it. This initial, incomprehensible tragedy has
the effect of uniting the characters who lived through it forever, making them
incapable of living together. Grandmother Agata gradually forgets names and things,
her granddaughter Giulia travels constantly and doesn’t know how to come back
home, Marco wants a woman who is not the woman he is with, Leni wanders from
house to house… no one is capable of giving or receiving happiness. The younger
characters revolve around the elderly lady who has forgotten everything except her
pain, with their unsatisfactory love lives and their intense desire for salvation. A
sensual, fast and painful novel which recounts a brand-new story, born of an
imagination rich in echoes, tears and blood. A young master of Italian narrative.
Chiara Valerio (1978) lives and works in Rome. She is an editor at ‘Nuovi
Argomenti’ and ‘Nazione Indiana’ and has published A complicare le cose (2003),
Fermati un minuto a salutare (2006), Ognuno sta solo (2007), Nessuna scuola mi
consola (2009).
Translation rights: Nottetempo
NON FICTION
Enzo Bettiza, 1989
Mondadori, May 2009, 162 pages
The end of the 20th century
After the Hungarian revolution of 1956 and the Prague Spring of 1968, ‘1989’ is the
last of a trilogy dedicated to these crucial dates. The book sums up the tortured path
of events leading to the collapse of totalitarian systems in the other Europe while, at
the same time, changing the fates of Communist parties in the west. The essay is a
totally new take on recent history, fearless and unbiased, a vividly realistic
recounting of the events and leading characters and behind-the-scenes characters
against the backdrop of a radical metamorphosis of 20th century Europe and of the
amazement of the world on the eve of the 21st century.
Enzo Bettiza has dedicated much of his activity as a writer and as a scholar to the
issues of Communism and Eastern Europe. From 1957 to 1964 he was a
correspondent in Vienna and then Moscow for ‘La Stampa’. For ten years he worked
as a correspondent for ‘Corriere della Sera’. In 1974, together with Indro Montanelli,
he founded ‘Il Giornale’ and was its substitute co-editor until 1983. His books
include: Il mistero di Lenin (Rizzoli, 1982), L’eclisse del comunismo (La Stampa
1994). Among his titles published with Mondadori 1956. Budapest: i giorni della
rivoluzione, La primavera di Praga.
Gianna Schelotto, Un uomo purché sia
Mondadori, May 2009, 192 pages
Stories of missed loves
It is perfectly understandable and quite natural for a woman to want to share her life with a
man. Bitterness and despair can ensue if she can’t find the right partner. However, the situation
turns dramatically bleak when the unsuccessful quest to find a partner becomes the center of a
woman’s existence. These missed love affairs, then, expand to fill a woman’s every emotional
space, they influence choices, expectations, plans, they cast a heavy shadow over everything
that life can offer. Gianna Schelotto has put together a series of stories in this book that depicts
the panic, the rage and the desire for deliverance from what women perceive as their
inexplicable and unfair solitary state. Some women do seem to grasp the fact that the problem
arises not so much from the man who got away (even though of course there could be tomes
written about him, too), but from a sense of incompleteness stemming from an ancient sense of
an emotional void, but also from a quite concrete desire for security. In spite of appearances,
the victims of this misconception of what love is end up confirming that age-old feminist
slogan—women don’t need a man to love them so much as they need to love themselves.
Gianna Schelotto is Italy’s most renowned sexologist, specialized in couples therapy and the
treatment of psychosomatic symptoms. She writes for newspapers and magazines. Mondadori
has published a number of successful books of hers such as: Il sesso, probabilmente, Perché
diciamo le bugie, Nostra ansia quotidiana, Equivoci e sentimenti, Per il tuo bene, Distacchi e
altri addii-Quando separarsi fa bene, Uomini altrove-Storie di cinquantenni in fuga, Ti
ricordi, papa? Padri e figlie, un rapporto enigmatico, E io tra di voi.