Titles in our catalogue

Salento, June 1934. A coach stops in the main square of Lizzanello, a village with only a few souls. A couple get off: the man, Carlo, a child of the South, is happy to be back home; the woman, Anna – his wife – is from the North. She is as beautiful as a Greek statue, but sad and worried: what kind of life awaits her in this unfamiliar land?

In the eyes of the villagers, Anna never ceases to be “the foreigner” who doesn’t attend church, doesn’t wander around the village and doesn’t gossip. Proud and prickly, Anna never yields to the customs of Southern women: not only does she take the postal services public exam, but actually passes it and becomes the first postwoman in the village, or rather the first “letter carrier”, as she wants to be called.

For over twenty years, Anna is the invisible thread that brings the village residents and their stories together. First on foot, then by bicycle, proud in her navy blue cap and uniform, Anna delivers letters from the young men at the front, postcards from emigrants and missives from secret lovers. Without meaning to – and above all without the villagers wanting it – the letter carrier changes many things in Lizzanello.

Salento, late 1950s. Lorenzo and Agnese have lost everything. Their father has sold the family’s soap factory, a legacy he experienced as a millstone, but which, for the siblings,  represented a reason for living. Now, to remain there as ordinary workers for a new, arrogant owner is a dreadful perspective. On an impulse, Lorenzo decides to leave, intending to find the money to take back what belongs to him. Agnese, on the other hand, decides to stay, unwilling to abandon her home of talc and soap. This leads to a serious and apparently fatal division between the siblings, taking them in opposite and unforeseen directions.

1868, NINA is an ordinary scullery maid serving Princess Margherita, who married the heir to the Italian throne a few months ago. For Nina, it’s a nightmare because she realises she is a pawn in a maze of intrigues. Her life changes, however, when she meets an elderly butler of the Savoy household. Nina learns to read and write, studies, encounters love and, over the years, crosses paths several times with the woman who is now Queen Margherita. But, one day, she is faced with a very difficult choice…

1868, MARGHERITA is ready to be the worthy and perfect wife of the Prince of Savoy. But as far as her husband Umberto is concerned, she might as well not exist. She soon discovers that her marriage is pure fiction and that her only duty is to give birth to a male heir. And yet Margherita has no intention of being sacrificed to the crown. She will be the one to conquer the hearts of the people and become an icon of her time: the first queen of Italy… until that fateful day in July 1900, when her entire world will capsize in just a moment.

The Florios, the Lions of Sicily, have won. Gone are the days of the modest putìa in central Palermo, the sacks of spices, of Paolo and Ignazio, who went there to escape poverty, with determination as their only wealth. Now, they own buildings and factories, ships and tonnaras, silks and jewels. Now, the entire city looks up to them, honours them and fears them. And young Ignazio fears no one. The destiny of Casa Florio has been his destiny since birth, it runs through his veins and drives him beyond Sicily, to Rome and political intrigues, to Europe and its courts, to the naval dominion of the Mediterranean, to buying the entire Aegadian Islands archipelago. Ignazio has a dazzling empire but a heart of ice, because, for the glory of Casa Florio, he had to give up the love that would have capsized his destiny. A love whose shadow never leaves him, even to the very end…

His son, Ignazziddu, on the other hand, is afraid when, at just over the age of twenty, he inherits all his father has built. He’s afraid because he doesn’t want to be enslaved to a name, to sacrifice himself on the family altar. He does his best, however, facing a world that’s changing too fast, shaken by new, violent and uncontrollable powers. He does his best but realises that having Florio blood isn’t enough to stand out. He needs something more, something his grandfather and his father had but which he lacks. But where, how has he gone wrong?

The Florios win everything, then lose everything. And yet this is only a part of their extraordinary story. Because this father and son, so different, so remote, have at their sides two women who are also very different and yet both exceptional: Giovanna, Ignazio’s wife, hard and fragile like crystal, filled with passion but starved of love, and Franca, Ignazziddu’s wife, the most beautiful woman in Europe, whose gilded life is shattered by the blows of a cruel fate.

It is these two women who trace the true trajectory – exciting and dreadful, glorious and tragic – of a family who, for a long instant, lit up the world. It is they who will make us understand why, after so many years, the Florios live on, unique and unforgettable, as the heartbeat of an island and of a city.

Nothing remains of the large factory and Villa Badoni is now unrecognisable. And yet for Marta, the family’s last descendant, this big house is still her heart’s home and the Badoni sisters’ stage. Laura, the eldest, is a rebel who loves freedom. Sofia had the love of her life snatched away from her too soon in a unfortunate accident. Piera is a frail and solitary soul. And there is Adriana, who devotes her life to the family business. At the centre of this female microcosm, there is the patriarch, Giuseppe Riccardo Badoni: the visionary entrepreneur with boundless ambition, who, thanks to the iron produced in his Lecco factories, becomes the protagonist of Italy’s industrialisation and reconstruction during the post-war period. He is a loving father to his eleven daughters, but will never come to terms with the tragic death of his only son, the heir destined to take over the business.

Milan, late 1800s. Angelo Rizzoli lives in grinding poverty with his mother and two sisters. He is a docile but very ambitious young boy who wants to escape misery. However, he cannot bear rich people and doesn’t like to have masters, so when, by chance, he meets a printing machine salesman, he starts his first printing shop, “A. Rizzoli & Co.”. In the 1920s between Socialism and Fascism, he becomes a publisher and prints the first periodicals. These are followed by books and, finally, cinema. Angelo frequents actors, directors and producers, and starts his own production company, Cineriz. In the 1960s, Angelo’s empire sweeps the Americas with the production of Fellini’s 8 1/2 and the opening of the Rizzoli bookshop in New York. His flair for people leads him to his most ambitious project: a new information daily with nationwide circulation, readable by all. However, he dies before achieving this dream, and with the certainty that the decisions of his family members will squander his empire amid intrigues and lies.

Rome, 1821. At the first light of dawn, young Gelsomina, cast out by her family because she is unmarried, dies giving birth to a girl. Her final wishes are that her daughter should have a charm that belonged to her father and the name of a flower. The medallion is passed on from mother to daughter, as is the tradition of the flower name. From Gelsomina’s daughter Ortensia, the Red Cross nurse in the entourage of Cristina Trivulzio di Belgioso, to Erica, one of history’s first women doctors to specialise in paediatrics. To Iris, who discovers the family history and the origin of the famous charm Gelsomina was given by a painter who was in love with her, and how his love token became an admonishment to all her descendants: to bloom against all adversity. To fight for your dreams and not wait for a man to make them come true.

1930s. Ida knows only too well that Rome’s Royal Physics Institute in Via Panisperna is a special place. Since she has worked there her life has changed. In its lecture theatres, she has acquired notions of Physics from the best scholars and met a group of young Italian scientists – the Via Panisperna Boys – whose studies have led to the creation of the atom bomb. They include the brilliant Ettore Majorana, with whom she has become friends, and Alberto, the love of her life. However, everything suddenly changes. Her father picks a husband for her and there’s nothing left for her to do but comply with his demands.

Meanwhile. the group of young scientists break up and Ettore Majorana mysteriously disappears. It’s the end of an era.

Italy, 1954. Ida decides to leave her home after her husband confesses that another woman is expecting his child. She is determined to find Alberto and, in order to do so, she must first locate her friend Ettore Majorana, hoping he is still alive and simply chose to change his path because his scientific research was becoming dangerous.

The snow is stained with blood around the tower of Kransberg castle. Just a few metres away, the Führer is in his bunker, steeped in fear and delirium after the attempt on his life in July 1944. Johann Maria Adami, however, has no time to think of those responsible for his internment in Dachau. Professor Adami has a mission: to discover the truth behind the suspicious death of a Nazi soldier. Was it suicide or a plot against Hitler? He needs all his intelligence not only if he has any hope of saving himself, but also to keep safe the person he loves most.

The snow is also stained with blood around the walls of the concentration camp in Risiera di Trieste. It’s not the first time and, as Ada knows, not the last either. It seems impossible to find the killer in a city riddled with murders, where the air is permeated with ashes and fear. While trying to track down the murderer, Ada is lonelier than ever: her father, Professor Johann Maria Adami, has been arrested by the Nazis for dissent and taken she knows not where, and her boyfriend has disappeared among the partisans. All she has left is her heart and her medical skills… as well as a secret she must protect at all costs.

Emanuele’s father is a Jungian psychologist, a magician capable of healing wounded souls. As a child, Emanuele soon learns that in order to survive in his father’s orbit it’s best for him to be a peripheral figure. After all, his mother keeps saying “You know what he’s like” whenever she talks about his father. But Emanuele doesn’t really know and, after his father dies, very little is left of him except an apartment no one wants, where the invisible mists of the lives and sorrows he had healed, oiled and straightened still linger.

So Emanuele decides to buy this flat and to live permanently in that atmosphere still hovering after his father’s life was cut short, because – first as a son, then as a writer – he wants to reconstruct the identity of a man who never left anything of himself in writing.

In an occupied Rome in 1944, a group of young partisans organise a brave action that will change the course of the war in the capital. Via Rasella, an anonymous street in the city centre, becomes the stage of a fierce clash between dictatorship and resistance.

It’s a risky plan that involves striking a column of German soldiers, the symbol of Nazi power, and sow chaos among the occupying forces. Those few metres, those few seconds, followed by hours of trepidation, waiting, uncertainty and patience, rigour and chance, become part of history. As do the stories of the young people, mostly from the middle classes, often university students, who form the Groups of Patriotic Action, founded a few months earlier against the German occupier.

On that brief – and endless – spring afternoon, there are those who get ready and those who are caught unawares, those who die and those who survive, those who run away and those who return. The attack, brilliantly carried out, unleashes a ruthless revenge that leads to reprisals of devastating proportions: for every German soldier killed, ten Italians will be murdered in Fosse Ardeatine.

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.

Giulia, educated and cosmopolitan, is an elegant violonist, but also a woman with a wild side the young Gramsci immediately loves and fears. He is in a sanatorium, depressed, with tremors, trying to recover his mental health. Their passion for each other is strong from the start and accompanies Gramsci until his last years in prison.

The fascinating story of Giulia Schucht, Gramschi’s wife, the mother of his children, his confidante and passionate lover, but who has inexplicably vanished from Gramsci’s biographies.

Val Germanasca. Lisse had five mothers, but he doesn’t exist as far as the Registry of Births is concerned because the woman who gave birth to him abandoned him in a field soon after he was born, on the summer solstice 1940. Ever since he was struck by lightning, Lumière has had premonitions no one believes, even though they’re charming to listen to. Like the other two, Frillo is a miner. He spends his days at the heart of the mountain and when he emerges he carves small statues from the same stone he quarries: talc. Tedesc, on the other hand, is a luthier and, after spending a few years abroad, has returned to his village to make his dream come true and create the perfect hurdy-gurdy. They fuel their incomplete lives with stories, in particular those they read in the books Lisse brings them. One day, these stories take on the voice of Alma, a young woman who arrives from South America like a mirage of freedom, and her guitar.

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.

Nina is sixteen years old when she falls off her bicycle. It’s no ordinary fall: the handlebar has penetrated her right thigh at the femoral artery. It’s a miracle she survives, and for the rest of her life she will have to listen to her body and pay attention to even the slightest symptom. So Nina starts to look differently at every emotion, experience, and even love, which can be narrowed down to a rational and biologocal explanation.

Twenty years later, with a doctorate in Clinical Pathology, Nina is convinced that even happiness can be explained in scientific terms. Then, one day, she meets a journalist: his name is Marte and he actually seems to have come from a different planet to burst the bubble in which she has obstinately taken refuge.

Loai Qasrawi, a studious and sensitive boy, son of a well-known keffiyeh producer, is bullied in 1960s Al-Khalil (Hebron) because of his ginger hair. He finds comfort and support in his friendship with Ahmad, a streetwise boy with a provocative personality, who tries to teach him to stand up to the bullies with more strength and courage. However, this friendship proves counterproductive and ends up worsening the situation: the bullying intensifies to the point where Loai’s parents decide to transfer him to a school in Nablus. Years later, in June 1967, fate brings them together again in the midst of the “Six-Day War.” The rekindled friendship between Loai and Ahmad intertwines with the tragic historical events, shedding light on universal themes such as friendship, personal growth, and resilience, all set in a complex and dramatically captivating context.

Within the walls of Grave, the orphanage in which Nica has grown up, stories and legends have always been told by candlelight. The most famous one is about the tear maker, a mysterious craftsman with eyes as clear as glass, guilty of having manufactured all the fears and anxieties that dwell in people’s hearts.

But, at the age of seventeen, the moment has come for Nica to leave all these dark childhood stories behind. Her greatest dream is about to come true. Mr and Mrs Milligan have begun the adoption procedures and are ready to give her the family she’s always wanted. However, Nica is not alone in the new house. Rigel, a restless, mysterious orphan, is also taken out of Grave, and he’s the last person Nica would wish for an adoptive brother. Rigel is intelligent, astute, plays the piano like a bewitching demon and is mesmerisingly handsome, but his angelic appearance conceals a dark temperament. Even though Nica and Rigel share a past filled with grief and deprivation, living together seems impossible; especially when the legend comes back to haunt their lives and the maker of tears suddenly grows increasingly real and draws nearer. Even so, gentle and brave, Nica is ready to do anything in order to protect her dream, because only by facing the nightmares that torment her will she finally be able to soar freely like the butterfly after which she was named.

Ivy grew up among frozen lakes and uncontaminated forests, surrounded by the snow she loves. This is why, after she is orphaned and forced to move to California, all she can think of is what she’s left behind. Canada and its land are a deep loss. Its mountains contain the past to which the girl is so attached, and that, unbeknown to her, makes her the carrier of a dangerous secret.

The only family she has left is that of John, her kind godfather. It’s not long before she realises that John’s son, Mason, is no longer the toothless little boy whose picture she saw as a child. He is now grown up, with the sharp eyes of a wild animal and a face like a lair of shadows. And the first time he smiles at her, menacing, curving his perfect lips, Ivy realises that living with him will be harder than she expected. Indeed, Mason doesn’t want her there and does nothing to conceal it.

As Ivy tries to keep her head above the violent waves of her new life by the ocean, Canada and its mysteries never cease to torment her while she does everything it takes to enable her heart, white as snow, to blossom once more, overcoming the winter cold.

Quirky and lavish, the Milagro Club is a place that can bewitch anyone who walks into it, including Mireya. Obstinate like someone with nothing to lose, the young woman gets herself hired as a bartender. The Milagro, however, is more than an exclusive nightclub. Behind its closed doors, beyond the sequins and stage lights, destinies and secrets are intertwined. The darkest ones are all gathered in the rugged, charming face of Andras, the head of security. Between Mireya and Andras, it’s hatred at first sight. Both carry on their skins the same marks, the brand of those who have had to learn to fight in order to survive. And yet they keep bumping into each other, as though attracted by a mysterious force they neither know nor are able to oppose, bound by a golden thread that is stronger than destiny.