CONTARE LE SEDIE

By the author of the award-winning debut, Storia naturale della famiglia, a stunning collection of stories, a touching portrait of a young woman.

How many lives is a woman's life made up of? Too many to waste time indulging in other people's desires. A vivid collection of stories starring a woman who deals with expectations, escapes, losses, encounters and her own identity. The most difficult exercise is to find the strength to simply say 'this is me', put all the pieces together, and acknowledge yourself as a whole. It seems obvious, but every girl knows that it is an achievement. This is the story of a woman who screws the coffee pot with the same strength she uses to repress her feelings, a little girl who jumps madly on the bed to try and undo her braids that feel too tight, a woman with lime-stained shoes who coordinates the workers building her house. The little girl whose first word was 'cement mixer', the student who gets hooked on numbers for the love of a surfer, the woman who discovers her desire for motherhood after an encounter with killer whales - these are all partial snapshots, capable of capturing the essential piece after piece. As in that game of chairs we used to play as children, by removing one piece at a time, we can start confronting our pain and self-love can finally be possible. Ester Armanino is a writer and an architect. Her first novel, Storia naturale di una famiglia (Einaudi, 2011) won the Kihlgren Opera Prima Prize, the Viadana Giovani Prize, the Zocca Prize and the Mediterranean Culture Prize - Young People's Fiction section. She is among the authors of Undici per la Liguria (Einaudi, 2015). In 2016 she published the novel L'arca (Einaudi).