Mario Fortunato

An Italian teacher’s relationship with his male student sparks legal and personal turmoil in this compelling novel of truth, desire, and power.A group of old friends are unexpectedly reunited in Calabria for a dinner party. When the conversation turns from reminiscing about their teen years to recent allegations against a local teacher, Marco Ferro, it unsettles the narrator. Days later, still reeling from the news, he sets out to learn more, grappling with the murky facts. His search rekindles a relationship with his former high school friend—Federica, beautiful and spoiled, married to Lino, and the mother of three boys—which in turn unspools in complicated and unanticipated ways. The action then moves to Tunisia, London, and Rome, in an incessant pursuit of who tells and who is told. In the end, it is the story of Marco Ferro and his young student Yussef, played out in both courtrooms and newspaper columns, that restores truth to the complicated sentimental geometries of the narrator and Federica.Exploring secrets and entangled power dynamics, Mario Fortunato’s timely new novel raises questions that rarely have simple or unequivocal answers.

Central Italy, on the eve of the Second World War. A group of young Italians find themselves in the midst of what will soon become a civil war. Among them is Stefano Portelli, a hopeful lawyer with a head full of utopias, in love with Eleonora. And there is his sister-in-law Nina, secretly linked to Sergio, a partisan leader. Other lives run parallel to theirs: that of Alastair Ormiston, an English Royal Air Force Pilot, who adores Virginia Woolf''s books and dreams of the ideal companion. And that of Edna, his best friend who, in a London bombed by the Nazis, discovers herself and her happiness. If their paths intersect in a shocking way, shuffling the cards of history, it will be through the work of a destiny greater than them, burning them in a bonfire where everything is consumed - joy and pain together.