Foundry Editions

On the hottest day of one of the hottest summers anyone has ever known, young journalist Federico Desideri is sent on an apparently routine assignment; to snatch an interview with Italy’s latest Oscar winning film director. But in Rome. Far from the comforts of his native Milan. When the director turns out to be elusive, and the Romans as rough as their reputation, Federico falls in with Barry Volpicelli, the rumoured inspiration behind the winning movie’s lead character - a seductive, fast-talking, America-obsessed rogue, and instead of finding his interviewee, he finds himself in Paradiso—Barry’s crumbling country estate on the Lazio coast, with an eccentric cast of inhabitants who seem frozen in time. Alan Bennett meets Fellini at a shabby, Italian White Lotus in this novel which is a satirical bildungsroman through the nature of illusion, escapism and the enduring myth of the Eternal City. As Federico navigates the absurdities, passions, and dangers of this apparent paradise, it starts to look more and more like purgatory, and he begins to question how he can find his way out.

Wanderer, washed-up writer and part-time philosopher of Athens’ nightlife, Michalis Krokos is more comfortable watching the Johnny Depp trial on livestream than getting down to his next book. But his apathetic state is shattered when prosecutor Sofia Charitsi shows up with some startling news. His long-lost friend Rebecca, a sharp-tongued trans sex worker, is in serious trouble. For some reason, a violent far-right group, ONET wants her silenced, and fast. To rescue her, Krokos agrees to go undercover as a fake news copywriter inside ONET’s inner circle. Write a few lies, steal a few secrets, take down a fascist or two. All in a day’s work, right? But what begins as a rescue mission spirals into a wild dive through backroom deals, blackmail, and political paranoia. Sofia is hiding her own complicated past with ONET’s megalomaniac leader, and Krokos ends up just trying to stay alive long enough to write something that might be worth publishing. Part literary noir, part darkly comic political thriller Deepfake explores truth, loyalty, and the absurd theatre of modern politics— set in the heart of a sweltering, sleepless Athens.

Annabella Morelli is twenty-three years old, dreams of becoming a poet and lives in Lyon, far from Congo-Brazzaville where she was born, the daughter of a Franco-Italian worker, and a Congolese girl who became a mother too young. Annabella remembers a happy childhood until one Christmas, when she was seven, her father's anger exploded, and her mother left the family home. When she learns of his death in Cameroon, her world collapses for the second time and in her desperate attempt to repatriate her father’s body to France, Annabella is forced to confront the family secrets, lies and deep trauma at the heart of her existence. This stunning debut explores grief, family relationships, personal truths and the post-colonial condition with beautiful, urgent writing. It was the winner of the 2024 Prix Goncourt du Premier Roman.

A nocturnal drift through the margins of Madrid—where lost souls cross paths with the surreal, and the city itself becomes a character. In this stark, luminous novel, Esther García Llovet returns to the shadows of the Spanish capital to trace the uneasy reunion of Nikki and Sánchez, two former lovers bound by shared history and mutual failure. She has returned from the borderlands of Gibraltar, where she dealt contraband. He, a man seemingly pursued by bad luck, accepts her offer out of desperation: help deliver a greyhound named Cromwell to a woman deep in the racing underworld. What follows is a long night’s descent through a Madrid untouched by tourism or nostalgia—a landscape of bingo halls, half-lit highways, silent gas stations, and after-hours bars that seem suspended in time. Here, even the fantastical feels plausible: a performance artist devours raw deer meat in the forest, while unspoken debts and spectral memories surface with the clarity only darkness allows. With clipped, exacting prose and dialogue that cuts like broken glass, García Llovet sketches a world that is both brutal and strangely tender—a Madrid of the mind, where the borders between absurdity, danger, and beauty dissolve. A singular voice in contemporary Spanish fiction, Sánchez confirms García Llovet as a master chronicler of urban estrangement and nocturnal grace.

Outside Vallorgana, a tiny, isolated village high in the foothills of the Dolomites, the ‘Duke’ lives in the villa of his aristocratic ancestors. The last in the centuries’ old line of the Cimamontes, he spends his days on his land and absorbed in the family archive, tolerated, if gently ridiculed by the villagers who are his neighbours. When he finds out that the village big man is taking timber from his land, he has a decision to make. Will he stay in his glorious, cerebral isolation or will he honour his ancestral blood and take action against this affront?Matteo Melchiorre’s portrait of the idiosyncratic character of the Duke and the world of Valorgana is a sweeping feat of literary imagination. With the pace, panorama and plot twists of a great nineteenth-century classic, the breathless story of the Duke’s ensuing feud unfolds, asking some big twenty-first century questions about our relationships with privilege, the past, the natural world and each other.

Not so much autofiction as autojournalism, rising star, Anna Pazos ’book is an exploration of the end of youth and the beginning of adulthood for the global nomad generation. Anna takes us with her on her journey, fleeing the ‘Mediterranean mediocrity ’of bourgeois Barcelona life, through her unstructured Erasmus days in Thessaloniki, her first steps in journalism in Jerusalem, her sail across the Atlantic with an unsuitable lover and to post- MeToo, pre-pandemic New York.When in 2021 she is forced back to Barcelona, an intimate exploration of her family, within the context of Catalan society, especially the independentist movement, makes her evaluate where she is in her life, and where she should be.

In tired, hot Paris at the end of August, a group of friends, who’d rather still be at the sea, meet for a dinner in one couple’s apartment.Taking us behind the shutters of the Sixth Arrondissement, with a cast of characters that both delight and repel, fractured relationships, manipulation, bad behaviour and desperation are all laid bare in this very contemporary take on a Parisian huis clos story.What starts as just a little dinner ends up having monumental consequences for everyone.The book was shortlisted for the 2024 Prix Goncourt du Premier Roman and won the 2023 Prix Littéraire Gisele Halimi for women’s writing.

Faysal receives a mysterious letter about the death of aunt he can’t remember. Leaving his lover and his life in Europe behind, he returns to the village of his birth in Palestine and to his family’s extraordinary, deserted house, the palace on the higher hill. With a backdrop of violence and the permanent threat from settlers, Faysal wanders the once-lavish rooms as characters from the past return to shed light on his family story and on the story of his people.In beautiful, angry prose, Karim Kattan introduces us to an intimate Palestine of the imagination where dreams and nightmares are in constant conflict. With hints of One Hundred Years of Solitude and Brideshead Revisited, he gives a nuanced deeply moving vision of the tragedy of war and a picture of his homeland that feels entirely new to English-speaking readers.The book won the 2021 Prix des Cinq Continents de la Francophonie.

Meet Michela, English gangster father, flamenco dancer mother, a hard, uncompromising police officer, operating on the shadier side of the law. In the company of this unorthodox, magnetically compelling character, cult writer Esther García Llovet takes us on a breath-taking, high-speed, anarchic romp through the underbelly of the pearl of the Costa Blanca, Benidorm, on the hunt for Reggie Kray’s stolen cigarette lighter. Beyond the sunburn and all-day fry-ups, in casinos, bars that are fronts for money laundering and flashy high society parties, we meet an unforgettable cast of characters English gangsters and Russian mafiosi, chancers, no-hopers, and low-life of all complexions in this unconventional yet literary thriller. With a turn of phrase that always astonishes, an eye for detail that is as forensic as it is cinematic, a sense of humour as dry as a glass of fino, and a wilful desire to break conventional genres, Llovet’s book feels like the best of Almodóvar in surreal, novel form.