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Table of Contents
About the Book
Three women. Three moments across time.
From international star Claudia Durastanti, Elena Ferrante meets Emily St. John Mandel in a dazzling new novel of Southern Italy, rebels and spies, oil country and the moon, revisionist history and imagined futures.
Amalia Spada is a woman with a restless and daring spirit. In post-reunification Southern Italy, she lives in a house among the ravines of the Lucanian region, a house that has become a refuge for outcasts and runaway rebels and wild girls seeking a new life. When industrialists and a local nobleman push to build a factory nearby, all of their lives are upended, and a shocking act of violence echoes across generations.
In the years after World War II, amidst an energy race, a young woman named Ada explores the Southern Italian region of Basilicata, where vast oil reserves have been discovered. She's looking for magic and love and oil. By turns translator and spy, this apprentice anthropologist is drawn to rural traditions even as they are transformed by the pursuit of black gold.
A hundred years later, Southern Italy has become the base for the colonization of the Moon: the Mediterranean Space Agency's spacecrafts depart from Lucania, bound for the New World. In this futuristic settlement lives A, a solitary and free woman who restores life to objects no one desires anymore. In her past there was a husband, but also the need to venture far away; in her present, she must come to terms with it all ending.
Missitalia tells its own version of history, a story shaped by the magical and elusive figures of three women, connected across ancient and future worlds. At once a feminist saga, a western, and a work of speculative fiction, Missitalia is a novel of striking originality and ambition by one of Italy’s most acclaimed contemporary writers.
From international star Claudia Durastanti, Elena Ferrante meets Emily St. John Mandel in a dazzling new novel of Southern Italy, rebels and spies, oil country and the moon, revisionist history and imagined futures.
Amalia Spada is a woman with a restless and daring spirit. In post-reunification Southern Italy, she lives in a house among the ravines of the Lucanian region, a house that has become a refuge for outcasts and runaway rebels and wild girls seeking a new life. When industrialists and a local nobleman push to build a factory nearby, all of their lives are upended, and a shocking act of violence echoes across generations.
In the years after World War II, amidst an energy race, a young woman named Ada explores the Southern Italian region of Basilicata, where vast oil reserves have been discovered. She's looking for magic and love and oil. By turns translator and spy, this apprentice anthropologist is drawn to rural traditions even as they are transformed by the pursuit of black gold.
A hundred years later, Southern Italy has become the base for the colonization of the Moon: the Mediterranean Space Agency's spacecrafts depart from Lucania, bound for the New World. In this futuristic settlement lives A, a solitary and free woman who restores life to objects no one desires anymore. In her past there was a husband, but also the need to venture far away; in her present, she must come to terms with it all ending.
Missitalia tells its own version of history, a story shaped by the magical and elusive figures of three women, connected across ancient and future worlds. At once a feminist saga, a western, and a work of speculative fiction, Missitalia is a novel of striking originality and ambition by one of Italy’s most acclaimed contemporary writers.
Product Details
- Publisher: S&S/Summit Books (April 13, 2027)
- Length: 336 pages
- ISBN13: 9781668205297
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Raves and Reviews
“A classic from the future.” –Vincenzo Latronico, author of Perfection
“A punk and imaginative novel, in which literary invention shatters traditional conventions with the anarchic spark of risk and fun.” –Veronica Raimo
"Missitalia is a novel of vaulting and thrilling ambition, from one of the most brilliant writers working today. Durastanti writes like no one else - with fierce intelligence, formal daring and bold imagination." —Katie Kitamura
"Missitalia marks a genre-imploding new departure for one of the most celebrated Italian writers of her generation. Moving with enviable dexterity between past, present and future, Durastanti weaves an unforgettable tale of class, colonialism and the end of the world. The best book yet from a truly unique voice." —Naoise Dolan
"Claudia Durastanti is a punk witch genius and one of Italy's most vital writers." —Joshua Cohen
"Missitalia puts into practice something similar with respect to the story of Southern Italy. It is a great southern novel, which takes place in the Basilicata of Garibaldi's revolts; and in that explored in search of oil in the economic boom of the 1950s; and in a Lucanian lunar base managed by a future Mediterranean Space Agency With a chorus of characters in which three women stand out - the godmother of a refuge for non-conformists; a scholar who becomes an accidental spy; an aged space colonist - Durastanti overturns the narrative of the South as a periphery of the West, seeking instead the signs of the profound movements of the present and of the future." –Vincenzo Latronico
"In a rare blend of poetry, wit, courage, and narrative force Durastanti explores the lives of fictional female characters in Italy in three parts spanning past and future. Missitalia is a brilliant, original novel across centuries, idioms and milieux, casting “italianità” in an entirely new light. Perceptive and wise, ironic and melancholy, it’s been my book of the year." —Esther Kinsky
“Claudia Durastanti writes from that unstable place where the center and the margins, belonging and alienation, her native language and her adopted language are constantly swapping places. Her writing is marked by extraordinary intelligence, but it is also a profound and infectious expression of intimacy.” —Nicola Lagioia, author of The City of the Living
"A novel like few others: lyrical, exciting, and ambitious. Three women, three eras, three literary genres, one territory, and the same struggle -- where life confronts the desert of capital as it gains ground everywhere, including in southern Italy." —Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, National Book Award Winner and twice nominated for the Booker
Praise for Strangers I Know
"A stunning English-language debut." —Jhumpa Lahiri
“A singular achievement, one of those rare books that expanded my understanding of what a novel can do. Claudia Durastanti is an absolutely thrilling writer.” —Lauren Groff
"Brave and deeply felt... My favorite kind of writing, the kind that not only tells of the world—but burrows through it, alive.” —Ocean Vuong
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Hardcover 9781668205297
