London Book Fair 2015

Frankfurt Book Fair 2019 Fiction List Andrea Tarabbia Madrigale senza suono [Silent Madrigal] February 2019 250 pages Novel Translation rights: The Italian Literary Agency (Claire Sabatier-Garat) Awarded the Premio Campiello 2019 In the Top-Ten Fiction Charts in October 2019 “A writer who dares to look down into the depths by flying high.” Helena Janeczek, Premio Strega 2018 The purest of music, the most brutal of crimes, and a daunting, ever subtle game of mirrors. A portrait of Gesualdo da Venosa in a grand novel depicting the prince and his solitude. A man alone and tormented. Obliged by the decorum of the times, he committed a brutal murder. A crime that would fire his own uncontainable artistic genius. That man was Prince Gesualdo da Venosa, the celebrated 16th-century composer of madrigals, and the focus of the hypnotic construction in this erudite, gothic, sensual novel. To pose the scandalous underlying question, how could something so evil give life to so much beauty, as expressed in da Venosa’s music? To save his honor, da Venosa killed his unfaithful wife, Maria D’Avalos, whom he had married amid a flurry of gossip and uproar, and her lover. The stuff of history books. But what remains in the wake of the event is the nostalgia-riddled solitude of the prince. Andrea Tarabbia dips his pen into the pool of blood and torment, and lures the reader into his maze. “Can beauty draw close to God (as envisaged by the nature of madrigals and responsories) and, at the same time, be pulled towards the most monstrous dimension of the human?” Corriere della Sera, La Lettura “That of Tarabbia is a sumptuous operation, layered, powerful, highly cultivated and meta- literary.” D la Repubblica “Madrigale senza suono [Soundless Madrigal] carries on and develops Tarabbia’s recurring themes: reflection on the evil that resides in man and History, and its paradoxical coexistence with art Bollati Boringhieri editore – Frankfurt Book Fair 2019 [email protected] and beauty, but also our capacity for self-determination with regard to what happens to us beyond and outside our volition.” Il Sole 24 Ore “[A novel] that is unlikely to leave readers unmoved.” La Stampa, TuttoLibri “Tarabbia, a trainer of Minotaurs, a huckster of freaks, conjures up the atmospheres of books like Victor Hugo’s The Man Who Laughs (…) according to criteria of fictional vertigo somewhere between the fiendishness of Thomas Mann and the narrative gargoyles of Alejo Carpentier.” Il Giornale “[A] hugely powerful piece of writing, further proof of [Tarabbia’s] elegant talent.” Grazia “A livid, restless, unsettling phantasmagoria at the bottom of which (…) brutality clutches pietas and tenderness horror; in which the language (…) appears to be made terser to allow the darkness to emerge with greater precision.” Blow up. “A disturbing yet marvellous novel.” Il mattino “An amazing novel for cohesion and narrative strength.” Avvenire “A hypnotic interplay of cross-references and a style of writing that resounds like a piece of music.” Marieclaire “Only fragility and suffering, taken by hand by love, take us to the deepest point of the world.” Alessandro D’Avenia, Corriere della Sera, on Il peso del legno “Drawn by a moral attraction, Tarabbia approaches a fact and uses it to investigate – without, miraculously, any hint of morbidness – the Evil in and of History through writing, in a tradition that goes from Dostoyesvsky’s The Devils to Carrère and Vollmann.” Marco Rossari, Il Sole 24Ore, on Il giardino delle mosche Andrea Tarabbia was born in Saronno, Italy, in 1978. He was shortlisted for the Campiello Award with Il giardino delle Mosche [The Garden of Flies] (Ponte alle Grazie 2016). His novels include La calligrafia come arte della guerra [Penmanship as an Art of War] (Transeuropa 2010), Il demone a Beslan [The Demon in Beslan] (Mondadori 2011) and Il peso del legno [The Weight of Wood] (NN editore). He is author of La buona morte. Viaggio nell’eutanasia in Italia (Manni 2014) an examination of euthanasia in Italy. He translated into Italian and edited Michail Bulgakov’s Diavoleide. Silent Madrigal is his first novel published by Bollati Boringhieri. Tarabbia lives in Bologna. 2 Bollati Boringhieri editore – Frankfurt Book Fair 2019 [email protected] Irene Salvatori Non è vero che non siamo stati felici [It's not true we weren't happy] September 2019 240 pages (85.000 words) Novel English translation sample available “Writing with the motion of a run-up (…) that increasingly draws you into its meandering world of sudden swerves here and there in a perfect combination of humour and drama, despair and fun, nostalgia and future.” Ermanno Paccagnini, Corriere della Sera, La Lettura A poignant letter written to a mother by a woman who, in turn, becomes a mother and wants to know how to go about the task. Emotively and literarily, an extremely high-temperature debut. Set between the Versilia district of Tuscany in the 1980s and 1990s, Krakow and Berlin, Non è vero che non siamo stati felici tells the story of a muddled-up apprenticeship with a combination of rare emotive incandescence and even amused poetry. The main character seems to be leading a sort of miniature travelling circus across Europe: she has three children, Caravaggio, Gauguin and Scoiattola (Squirrel) and two animals (Hungarian hounds). There are no posters or placards, every night it’s an impromptu performance. The protagonist, who writes to her dead mother because she can’t speak to her, has the job of choosing the venue and putting up the big top. Most important of all, she has to perform the most daring piece of magic: though her heart is racked with nostalgia, she has to convince her children that the world is a nice place. For Germans, Heimat is the place one comes from and will belong to forever. For the small family in the novel, who travel, language by language from country to country, it’s the place that’s north on their compass. Matter-of-factly, they soon realise, however, that it’s not geography that provides the answer. Heimat is the mother: there is no other place of origin, hence no other possible destination. It's not true we weren't happy is a long letter – despairing, mad, draining, amazing, magical – to a mother who has never really died. For, one might say, a mother never dies: one thing’s for sure, it’s not fate and its puerile twists that leave us orphans. “A continuous, poetic stream of consciousness (…) The pain of loss, resurgence, anxiety, misery – life today in a debut novel one reads holding one’s breath.” Marie Claire “A long, sustained letter to her prematurely dead mother – a sacred iconostasis and a longed- for affective presence – is the driving force of this Bildungsroman, the novel of the formative years of a traveller who only finds peace in the perennial anxiety of a Heimat, as she calls it, the hearth and home she carries in her suitcase.” Il Piccolo Irene Salvatori was born in Forte dei Marmi in 1978. A graduate in Contemporary History at the University of Pisa, she subsequently studied in Krakow and lived in Berlin. She is a translator from Polish and German and she writes poetry. She plans to move to the south of France. 3 Bollati Boringhieri editore – Frankfurt Book Fair 2019 [email protected] Valentina Maini La mischia [The Melee] March 2020 Novel 145.000 words Unedited manuscript and translation sample available A riveting ‘world novel’ rooted in a noble literary tradition championed by the likes of Roberto Bolaño. A cross-generational debut capable of attracting both the most seasoned readers – capable of recognising all the references it contains – and the new generations whose themes it is closest to. 2007: in a ‘psychedelic’ Bilbao, worn-out by the final attacks of Basque terrorism, live two twins, Gorane and Jokin, the children of ETA terrorists. Separated from her twin brother by a mysterious, tragic event, Gorane is the victim of strange hallucinations as a result of which she finds herself under the care of a psychiatrist, while Jokin, a musician and a heroin addict, escapes to Paris to embark on a new life. It is around the stories of the two twins – opposite and complementary, the one necessary for the other – that The Melee revolves. This ‘world novel’ consists of fragments that are apparently worlds apart but actually cogs in the same wheel, at once magical and realistic. There’s Bilbao, filtered through the sensitive eyes of Gorane, there’s, above all, Paris – a city but also the main character in the novel – and there’s Arrautza, an imaginary land – or maybe a heaven – from which we hear the whispers of the dead. In her first novel, Valentina Maini drags us into a complex, tragic, moving and sometimes mystical universe, in which the only driving force seems to be blind violence; not so much – or not only – that of terrorism, but also family, social, amoral and self-destructive violence. Whether it’s a matter of drug addiction, police persecution, pyromania, terrorism, mental illness or love is immaterial: it is uncensored violence that feeds the body of the novel and breathes life into it. How can so much beauty exist in pain? Can liberty – the great conquest of our time – turn out to be an instrument of torture, concealing traps that we never envisaged? Through a farrago of middle-class families, drug pushers, maniacs, writers, suitcase slashers, fortune tellers and cleaning women, Valentina Maini fearlessly looks chaos in the face. Valentina Maini was born in Bologna in 1987. After studying in Bologna and Paris for her European research doctorate in comparative literature, she works as a translator into Italian from French and English.

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