ANIMAL SPIRIT by Francesca Marciano

Knopf

Available now

Loved, loved every short story in Animal Spirit. Francesca Marciano is a talented writer. This is such an elegantly written book. Joy and heartache are  handled with an unsentimental pen, and touch your senses with human understanding.  

Read it, even if short stories isn't your usual fare

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

THE THERAPIST by Nial Giacomelli

Fairlight Modern
Available now

Description

A strange epidemic is sweeping the globe. Little by little, each victim becomes transparent, their heart beating behind a visible rib cage, an intricate network of nerves left hanging in mid-air. Finally, the victims disappear entirely, never to be seen again. In this bittersweet and hauntingly surreal tale, a couple struggle to connect while the epidemic creeps nearer. ‘I dreamt we were at sea,’ she says.

My thoughts soon

THE GIRL RETURNED by Donatella Di Pietrantonio

🌺🌺🌺🌺
Europa Editions
Publishing 
date July 2019

Winner of the Campiello Prize.

A pitch-perfect rendering in English by Ann Goldstein, Elena Ferrante’s translator.

“I was the Arminuta, the girl returned. I spoke another language, I no longer knew who I belonged to. The word ‘mama’ stuck in my throat like a toad. And, nowadays, I really have no idea what kind of place mother is. It is not mine in the way one might have good health, a safe place, certainty.”

Told with an immediacy and a rare expressive intensity that has earned it countless adoring readers and one of Italy’s most prestigious literary prizes, A Girl Returned marks the English-language debut of an extraordinary literary talent. Set against the stark, beautiful landscape of Abruzzo in central Italy, this is a compelling story about mothers and daughters, about responsibility, siblings, and caregiving.

Without warning or explanation, an unnamed 13-year-old girl is sent away from the family she has always thought of as hers to live with her birth family: a large, chaotic assortment of individuals whom she has never met and who seem anything but welcoming. Thus begins a new life, one of struggle, tension, and conflict, especially between the young girl and her mother. But in her relationship with Adriana and Vincenzo, two of her newly acquired siblings, she will find the strength to start again and to build a new and enduring sense of self.

My view

The girl returned is a very appt title for this novel.

The novel opens with a thirteen year old girl carrying her belongings up some steps towards an open door held by her younger sister, although the two sisters have never met.

This is a story of abandonment, of good intentions and, how a child fulfils two women's dreams and needs

At thirteen she is send by her mother to live in a poverty ridden home run by a family with three sons and a nine year old daughter.

With a distance of twenty years, now a grown woman, she shares her recollections of those years with her new family, the discovery of her real mother, the abandonment by the only mother she knew for thirteen years.

The writing is beautiful, characters well developed, the subject of the story, perhaps a cautionary tale....

Thank you NetGalley and Europa for allowing me this arc

THE OTHER LANGUAGE by Francesca Marciano

Pantheon
Available at your bookstore

Synopsis

The characters in the compelling stories novelist and screenwriter Francesca Marciano collects in The Other Language are displaced—both geographically and in matters of the heart. Mostly women, but a few men as well, they are educated, well-heeled and discontent, adrift in an ever-contracting world that has clouded the notion of home.

The title story—one of the finest—begins with an enticing Alice Munro-like premise: A 12-year-old Italian girl and her family vacation in a small Greek village in the wake of her mother’s mystery-shrouded death. There she substitutes one English brother for another as her object of affection, carrying the complicated memory through the years until adult truths clarify the meaning of the events. Another richly layered story, “The Presence of Men,” is built on a clash of cultures as a Roman woman, scarred by divorce, seeks refuge in a village in a remote corner of Italy. The inroads she makes into local acceptance are jarred when her Hollywood agent brother and his movie star client show up and upset the delicate balance. In “An Indian Soirée,” reminiscent of the atmospheric, incisive stories of the late Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, a couple has come to the subcontinent for an extended sojourn, and in one the space of one morning their marriage falls apart.

A number of stories are set in Africa, where Marciano has lived. “The Club,” with the indomitable Mrs. D’Costa at its center, quietly explores class and race in post-colonial Kenya. “Big Island, Small Island” reunites two lost souls who realize it is impossible, indeed useless, to try to recreate the past. And “Quantum Theory,” set in Africa and New York, offers a bittersweet meditation on the significant difference between falling in love and being in love.

Many of these nine well-crafted and entertaining stories are built on chance encounters, and in Marciano’s assured hands the reader accepts the intervention of fate without question. These are stories about finding love in a fragile world, but even more, about all of the connections—past and present—that shape us and anchor us in place.