Noi siamo tempesta

Winner of the Elsa Morante Prize, Super Winner of Ragazzi 2019 and of the thirty-eighth edition of the Andersen Prize One of the most important voices on the Italian cultural scene revolutionises the way we tell children stories.

Designed by THE WORLD OF DOT, with a comic strip by PAOLO BACILIERI

Bestseller – English sample available

Unity makes for strength – or does the person who works alone have enough power for three? There can be no doubt: human beings have always recorded their most important achievements together. But literature persists in presenting us as a colourless mass from which only individual heroes can emerge Is there any way for us to recapture the urge to be special together? Perhaps there is. And it may come from the same source as everything else – from stories that teach us how to dream. It is a sad world that needs heroes, as Bertold Brecht once wrote, but it is difficult to accept that he must be right if stories about heroes are not only the first stories we hear as children, but also the only stories we read when we reach school age, and still the only stories that inspire us once we are grown up. The figure of the solitary champion may be an exciting one, but it has no place in our everyday lives and remains the exception. On the other hand, daily life is made up of admirable achievements by entirely ordinary people who have understood how to work together and trust one another.

That is how Wikipedia was born, how the secret wartime code of the Nazis developed, and how the struggle against racism entered every home in which people watched the Olympic Games in 1968. Michela Murgia has picked sixteen collective adventures, some very famous and others entirely unknown, and has retold them as it were chorally, because individual heroism is a path open to few while creative collaboration, on the other hand, is accessible to all. After all, a storm is nothing more than millions of drops of water, unless it is guided by the right wind.