Helena Janeczek, winner of the 2018 Strega Prize, revisits the 20th century from the beginning, reliving – from within every character – the yet unfinished past in an attempt to grasp their unresolved heritage.

A polyphonic tale of normal, yet extraordinary characters, of true, peripheral or semi-known stories that prove how the time of unforseen events is also a time of possibilities worth investigating

The Zanetta sisters arrive in a Milan buzzing with the 1906 world fair and subscribe to Socialist dreams, although the youngest is arrested for defeatism in the years immediately after Caporetto.
In 1920 Trentino-Alto Adige the air is good for those with health conditions and Doctor K. thinks he is at the heart of a spying intrigue arising from the correspondence with his translator Milena Jesenská.
In Venice, the daughter of the great American poet Ezra Pound wanders across the city unaware that she is being spied on by a boy with whom she shared her childhood.
Finally, the young Albert O. Hirschman joins his sister and brother-in-law in Trieste, a city fuelled by the hedonistic, commercial spirit of its proudly Italian middle classes, those same middle classes that will shortly see their world struck by racial laws, like the most unthinkable and dreadful of unforeseen events.

The true story of Gerda Taro, a photojournalist killed during the Spanish Civil War at the age of twenty-six. A free, joyful woman who challenged the darkness of the 1930s, rediscovered through the eyes of those who loved her.

Full English translation available

August 1937. A sea of red flags makes its way through Paris. It is Gerda Taro’s funeral procession. She was the first photographer to die on the battlefield, who that very day would have turned twenty-seven. Robert Capa in the front row is devastated: he is the one who taught her to use her Leica camera, and together they covered the Spanish War and were willing to die for a country that was not theirs in the name of freedom. In the crowd are all the people who were somehow linked to Gerda: among them is Willy Chardack, her eternal loyal knight, to whom the irresistible girl preferred Georg Kutitzkes, now fighting in the International Brigades. Decades later, these two make an intercontinental phone call that triggers the creation of a multi-faceted novel based on original sources with Gerda as its beating heart. It is her heartbeat that weaves together faraway places and times, giving life to the Polaroids taken by these young adults during the 30s, whilst facing the economic depression, the rise of Nazism, and the hostility towards refugees, which in France targeted above all Jews and leftwing supporters like them.