Literary Fiction

Il dolore crea l’inverno

(Grief Creates the Winter)

Garzanti, February 2023, pp.160

English sample available

Elia Legasov has inherited the family business: he is a snow sweeper in a town immersed in whiteness.

But, one day, the snow betrays him by yielding from its depths something that should have remained buried and forgotten. Elia consequently has to remember and start to question everything.

Elia Legasov was born in a town surrounded by whiteness and has never left.

His job is to shovel snow and clear streets along which nobody walks until the snow reveals something from its depths. Something connected to Elia’s family and all that was supposed to remain buried. From that moment on, Elia’s mind becomes crowded with memories he had suppressed: memories of a father who died many years ago and a mother who left for ever.

This makes Elia believe what people say about his family: that the snow does not protect them but, on the contrary, puts them to the test to see if they are capable of forgetting, because everybody forgets. But the Legasovs remember, always.

It is now Elia’s turn to remember, whatever the cost. Because grief creates the winter, only every winter is different from the one before and the one before that.

Garzanti, February 2023, pp.160

  • “Intensité et brièveté sont les caractéristiques de ce roman. Le jeune et prometteur Matteo Porru dissèque (…) les tourments existentiels d’un homme aux secrets de famille longtemps enfouis. Le tout sur un rythme paradoxalement haletant, où l’émotion n’est jamais en reste.”

    Florence Courriol-Seita, Le Monde

  • “One of the most promising under twenty-fives in the world.”

    D, La Repubblica

  • “A great existential metaphor for oblivion and the day of reckoning of memory, told in a lyrical, expressionist tone.”

    Giulia Calligaro, Io, Donna

  • “Porru’s writing is mesmerising, measured and dreamlike […] with a storytelling maturity capable of making even the murkiest shades of human behaviour poetical.” 

    Patrizia Violi, La Lettura - Corriere della Sera

Rights Sold

France: Buchet&Chastel.

Matteo Porru

Matteo Porru won the Giovani Campiello prize at just eighteen. The press has proclaimed him to be one of the most promising writers under twenty-five in the world.

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