Title: Wintry, pp146
Author: Dario Voltolini
Publisher: La nave di Teseo
Rigths sold in Spain (Libros del Asteroide), France (Éditions Sous sol), Egypt (Logha Publishing), UK (New Cross Press)
Awards
- Strega Prize 2024: second place
- Flaiano Award 2024 award: finalist
- Lussu Award 2024 award: winner
- Wondy Award 2024 award: winner
- Valle d'Aosta Award 2024: winner
- Bergamo Award 2025: finalist
Author of short stories, novels, radio plays, songs and librettos for the theatre, Dario Voltolini (Turin, 1959) has written, among others, “A metropolitan intuition”, “Rincorse”, “Waveforms”, “10”, “Primaverile”, “The monkeys have inadvertently left the cage”, “Foravìa”, “Pacific Palisades”.
For the publishing house La nave di Teseo he wrote “II Giardino degli Aranci”, Invernale (second in the 2024 Strega Prize), Su (a collection of wide-ranging interventions on culture (2025) and for Baldini + Castoldi, Dagli undici metri (2025).
Reading Dario Voltolini makes one think that one could do without the world: his words alone are enough—his brilliant descriptions, capable of capturing things and making them shine like no one else can.
Tiziano Scarpa - Strega Prize
“Literary mastery, torment, restrained anger, beauty, despair, and humility. The final pages of this book will bring tears to your eyes.”
Antonio Moresco, author of Songs of Chaos
“Winter” is a powerful novel that sweeps you away and lifts you up, grabs you by the shoulders, and stares you straight in the eyes—and Voltolini is a great writer; there’s just no getting around it.
Sandro Veronesi - Two-time Strega Prize winner
The gaze of the twenty-year-old son is imbued with humanity, wrapped in modesty; never judgmental, it skims like a swallow over his parents’ lives and ultimately penetrates them. He questions evil, shares his suffering with us, and caresses and weeps for his father, page after page. One senses respect, intelligence, and kindness. Winter is a novel written in a state of grace, imbued with brilliant reflections, overflowing with love and great respect. Federica De Paolis
Title: The Bush
Author: Dario Voltolini
Publisher: Aboca Edizioni,pp. 112, 2026
Rights: r.vivian Literary agency
It rolls, ceaselessly, through deserts and abandoned cities. The wind propels it: the same wind that whispers unheard stories, while the sun burns and the sand blinds. It is a bush: an unlikely yet irresistible storyteller, a silent witness to violence, mystery, and human secrets. Day after day, amid violent storms and downpours, it flies, falls, bounces, and flies again. And every fall is an act of liberation, every roll an epiphany. From the Mojave Desert to the island of Giglio, from the rugged rocks of the Karst to Crete, this rootless traveler narrates, observes, and reflects with an unusual yet entirely plausible voice. The reader is captivated by its hypnotic movement and cannot put it down: until a poignant final crescendo leads this brief and tense novel into the realm of fantasy literature. After *Invernale*—an acclaimed finalist for the Strega Prize—Dario Voltolini returns to craft a seemingly minimalist story, made up of few but memorable elements.
I haven’t mentioned—and it bears noting—that I, too, smiled while reading *Il cespuglio*, because Dario Voltolini possesses a clear and agile intellect, capable of expressing itself through humor that is both effective and very gentle, and with a mastery of words and syntax that amazes with every line.
A contemporary ecological fable: a bush embarks on a journey around the world through a series of adventures and twists that draw the reader in as well.
Title: From Eleven Meters Away
Author: Dario Voltolini
Publisher: Baldini + Castoldi, 2024, pp. 140
Rigths: r. vivian literary agency
The book tells the story of a goalkeeper from his youth to the first team.
We discuss elements of an athlete's footballing life that are a metaphor for our own individual lives: predisposition, talent, training, and dedication. We focus in particular on one aspect: "intuition," which we follow when faced with alternative choices.
This intuitive ability is both a talent and the result of mental, personal, and character growth.
The development of this ability is recounted by following the young athlete's evolutionary steps and culminates in a surprising ending that condenses his entire journey: at the crucial point of his career, the goalkeeper finds himself face to face with his opponent during a penalty kick that will determine his team's victory or defeat in the final of a crucial tournament. For the first time in his career, the goalkeeper waits for his intuition to tell him which direction to dive to save the penalty (an intuition that, once developed within him, has always guided him psychologically and physically, making him an astonishing champion), but it doesn't come. The opponent begins his run-up, and the goalkeeper waits for the intuition to save the penalty, waiting at every step of the opponent, waiting until the moment he is about to kick. But no intuition comes to his aid, and so he stands motionless on the goal line in despair. The player opts for an arrogant chip, and the ball simply flies into the goalkeeper's arms. No intuition, no choice: they were the right thing to do.
Awards:
Finalist for the 2025 Gianni Mura Award
Nino—that’s the protagonist’s name—met Luciana in high school and fell in love with her in that intense, reckless way that’s unique to first love: to catch her attention, driven by the unbridled joy he felt, he drew rainbows and gave them to her every day during the break between classes. In Luciana’s presence, Luciana, bewildered, accepts these bizarre gifts, leaving no room for anything else. But then, inexplicably, she “gets engaged” to Attilio, and the relationship with Nino Nino ends before it even begins. Now, many years later, Luciana and Nino Nino have a date at the Orange Garden: they met again by chance at IKEA a few days earlier; both are married and have children, but the desire to chat and revisit the past is strong and drives them toward this meeting. And so, as Nino Nino makes his way to the Giardino degli Aranci, he finds himself talking to himself, thinking back on the girls who had attracted him before Luciana entered his life, and acknowledging that it was precisely that passion—so strong as to leave no room for doubts or fears, painless despite the incomplete outcome of his efforts—that made him a man capable of finding his place in the female universe. Until, during his encounter with Luciana, curiosity gets the better of him and he asks her how things really went in high school... Writing at its finest, clear and precise, describing a luminous emotional coming-of-age.
Title: The Orange Garden
Author: Dario Voltolini
Publisher: La Nave di Teseo, 2022, pp 120
Rights: r.vivian literary agency
Title: The Hole, forthcoming
Author: Gessica Franco Carlevero
Publisher: Sellerio Editore, 225, pp 224
Rights: r.vivian literary agency
https://www.dallacartalloschermo.com/post/recensione-il-buco-gessica-franco-carlevero
Reading this novel raises many questions, including this: is there still an adult life to describe for an entire generation that has no future to call home?
An original and truthful novel that I recommend to anyone who wants to better understand the new generation.
Gessica Franco Carlevero was born in Canale in 1980 and lives in Marseille.
She directs the literary magazine La Bibliothèque italienne, a project aimed at promoting contemporary Italian literature in France, and works as a communications and marketing manager for a winery.
Among his publications, the novel Metà Guaro metà Grappa, Fandango, 2006 (Awarded at the Budapest First Novel Festival), the texts on creative writing Meravigliosamente and A mente libera (Einaudi Scuola) and several collections published among others in Panta (Bompiani), L'Accalappiacani (Derive e Approdi), L'immaginazione, effe and L'inquieto.
Thirty-five years old and a hole in her head the size of a glass.
The protagonist began pulling out her hair as a child, when her father went into hiding because of gambling debts and her mother began a relationship with a violent, emotionally unstable underage boy.
Some children live adult lives, waiting for time to pass, invisible to others and to themselves. They grow up unprepared and helpless, with the sole imperative of not repeating what they have experienced.
After graduating, the protagonist doesn’t know which direction to take and starts dating Giacomo, a Venetian guy she meets by chance.
Seven months into her pregnancy, for no apparent reason and without knowing a word of French, they loaded their suitcases into a van and set off for Marseille.
And at that point, motherhood proves more difficult than expected. Inconsistencies emerge between the idea of an imaginary motherhood and the reality of the situation, as well as her memories of herself as a daughter.
In her new role as mother and wife, the protagonist finds herself facing situations her mother had faced in the past, with every determination not to repeat the pattern, despite herself.
And the absence of her father, who never returned, and of her mother—absent yet present—continues to manifest itself in that void in her mind.
A tic, they said at first; trichotillomania, she discovered much later—a testament to the past that influences the present despite her desire to avoid it.
But what makes Gessica Franco Carlevero’s novel so vibrant and, in its own way, luminous, is the language. A language that bends and adapts to the disordered, acute, tender, and sharp thoughts of its protagonist. Irma’s voice is real, alive, incandescent. It accompanies you through her reflections as she breastfeeds, as she writes, as she argues, as she observes the world from her small, vast “hole.” And it is not a voice created for pleasure. It is a voice that questions and that lingers.
Title: The Island and Time
Author: Claudia Lanteri
Publisher: Einaudi, 2024, pp 350
Rights sold to: Folio Verlag in Germany
Métaillé éditions in France.
Claudia Lanteriwas born in Caltanissetta. Her parents, who founded a Teatro Stabile here, passed on to her a passion for stories from a very young age.
After graduating in Modern Literature in Palermo, she continued his studies in Rome with a master's degree for creative professions from the Luiss Business School. She lived in London for five years, collaborating with various fashion, theatre, cooking and sports companies as an artworker and web designer. Since 2015 she has returned to live in Sicily, where she works as a consultant in the field of strategic communication and digital innovation, combining her humanistic education with the visual skills consolidated abroad.
Passionate about photography and literary criticism, she would like to write much more fiction and fewer editorial plans. The Empty Island is his first novel
In this insular thriller, where a tight plot meets powerful literary writing, the events unfold in a time that is both defined (the 1960s) and undefined, in a certain sense mobile: a time in which everything continues to happen, in which the past blends with the present.
An anomalous event, after the initial disturbance, is reduced to nothing, incorporated into the habits and immutable rhythms of the inhabitants of a small community.
But not for Nofriu, who is unable to resume his old life and who remains forever tied – along with the reader – to the unsolved enigma.
Appreciated by critics and the public, the book has found great resonance abroad: the translation into French (Éditions Métailié) and into German (Folio Verlag) are in progress.
Title: The anecdote of the calchi
Author: Maria Teresa Rovitto
Publisher: Terrarossa editore, April 2026
Rights: r.vivian literary agency
Maria Teresa Rovitto was born in Basilicata in 1987. She has published in magazines such as Nazione Indiana, Argo, In allarmata radura, and in the anthologies L'ordine sostitutiva (déclic editions) and L'ora senza ombre (Pidgin Editions). She won the pordenonelegge Debut competition with the collection Beautiful Feet – جميلة أقدام (La Gialla – Samuele Editore). L'aneddoto dei calchi (TerraRossa Editions, April 2026) is her first novel.
Livia’s life begins to unravel following Vanessa Beecroft’s performance VB66, which depicts the charred bodies from the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD. After losing her job and ending her relationship with Bruno, she befriends the drag queen Patty and comes to terms with the void left by Zoa, who has returned to Greece to become an artist. The two friends’ participation in the tableau vivant thus marks a turning point for both: Zoa will radicalize her way of being in the world, while Livia will redefine her relationship with her own body and with her father’s illness. Maria Teresa Rovitto’s debut film is a reflection on art and its impact on people’s lives, on the search for self in relation to one’s own expectations and those of others, and is striking both for the maturity of its ideas and for its elliptical, literary, and nonconformist style.
A reflection on contemporary art, an intimate and painful story, and writing of the highest quality. More than just a debut, Maria Teresa Rovitto’s *L'anecdoto dei calchi* explores the body, the meaning of identity, what it means to “duplicate” life through art, and the price one must pay.
Stefano Bonazzi on Satisfiction:
https://www.satisfiction.eu/maria-teresa-rovitto-laneddoto-dei-calchi/
Laura Pugno for the Noun, Verb, Adjective, and Adverb column in Words and Things:
https://www.leparoleelecose.it/nome-verbo-aggettivo-avverbio-14-maria-teresa-rovitto/
Title: Pieces
Author: Giorgia Tribuiani
Publisher: Il Saggiatore, March 2026, pp. 320
Rights: R. Vivian Literary Agency
Giorgia Tribuiani (Alba Adriatica, 1985) is a writer and creative writing teacher. She has published the textbook Scrivere il perturbante (Scrivere il perturbante, 2023) and the novels Guasti (Guasti, 2018), Blu (Blu, 2021), and Padri (Padri, 2022). The English translation of Padri, by Isabella Corletto, won the PEN/HEIM Award for Translation. The rights to Padri were purchased in Ukraine (Anetta Antonenko Publishers).
Seventeen blackbirds playing a macabre game. Five days to find a solution. An entire village forced to reveal its secrets to save the life of one of its inhabitants. A dark tale of suspicion, fear, and human frailty.
With Pezzi, Giorgia Tribuiani writes a dark tale reminiscent of the Salem Fires and the Spoon River Confessions. A choral story about memory as a form of collective responsibility, illuminating human fears and frailties, but also the solidarity that can arise in a situation of extreme terror.
“Pezzi” is a complex novel, decidedly more complex than Tribuiani’s previous works. It is a novel that unfolds through intertwining and overlapping elements, in which obsessive and unsettling motifs blend with an almost gothic atmosphere and a narrative tension constantly pushed to the limit. It is a novel that does not aim to reassure the reader; on the contrary, it does the exact opposite. Its goal is to keep the reader on edge until the very end.
David Valentini - Literary Critic
https://www.criticaletteraria.org/2026/04/giorgia-tribuiani-pezzi-il-saggiatore.html
"Great book [...] A hard book, but surprisingly hilarious." - Margherita Oggeto, TuttoLibri (La Stampa)
"Delicious, bright, vibrant." - Conventional
“ The ridiculous age is a novel that seems like a long conversation between different generations in which, however, the problems are always there, halfway between love and pain. [...] A novel that wants to underline how much the meaning of growing up is transversal to age, to ways of being and becoming. "
"A novel with a hilarious, amusing, but never banal plot, in which an accurate investigation of human behavior, the conflict between different cultures, the true value of love and loneliness are mixed." - About the Novel
Title: The Ridiculous Age
Author: Margherita Giacobino
Publisher: Mondadori, 2018, pp. 271
Rights: r.vivian literary agency
Translated into English by Dedalus with the support of Cepell
