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NEI MARI ESTREMI

Lalla Romano

A breathtakingly beautiful novel about the first 4 years and last 4 months of a great love, by a "lacerating, luminous" Italian author (Jhumpa Lahiri, author of Interpreter of Maladies)

Perfect for fans of short, razor-sharp modern literary classics like Annie Ernaux and Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking
Upon the death of her husband, Innocenzo Monti, Lalla Romano sought to distil the essence of their long life together. The result was In Farthest Seas: a piercingly intimate retelling of the first 4 years and final 4 months of their relationship, built from shard-like moments of connection and revelation.

The 1st section spans the couple's early attraction, which developed through long conversations on hikes in the mountains surrounding Cuneo, to their wedding and arrival at their first home together. A subtle note of elegy sounds through these recollections of love, and this note comes to the fore in the longer 2nd section that recounts the final 4 months of Innocenzo's life.

With precise artistry, Romano braids together seemingly minor details the expressiveness of Innocenzo's hands, the beauty of his face in sleep, a fleeting instance of pallorthat come to reveal the barest truths of life and death. Unsparing yet tender, minimal yet monumental, In Farthest Seas is a startlingly moving elegy, and perhaps the greatest work by a rediscovered Italian master, who's been compared to Natalia Ginzburg and Cesare Pavese.

Lalla Romano (19062001) was an Italian novelist, poet, painter, and journalist, and one of the most refined and distinctive voices of 20th-century Italian literature. A student of Cesare Pavese, Romano brought a painter's eye to her prose - spare, precise, and emotionally resonant. Her novels often explore memory, identity, and intimate relationships, drawing from personal experience with rare psychological insight. Among her most celebrated works are Le parole tra noi leggere (winner of the Strega Prize in 1969), La penombra che abbiamo attraversato, Tetto murato, and Nei mari estremi. Her literary legacy is deeply intertwined with postwar Italian cultural life, yet her voice remains strikingly contemporary.
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Published 2025-08-26 by Pushkin Press Classics

Comments

Autofiction at its most elegant. It's a sign of the quality of the writing, and power of Brian Robert Moore's beautiful translation, that even when reading analytically as a reviewer, I often found myself putting the book down still in a dream of its voice

Her language is incredible, essential in its quality. An extraordinarily powerful book

This is a book for those who know that the best time to take a walk in a cemetery is when you're wildly in love

Romano's miraculous work opens layer by layer, always guarding its innermost mystery. This is one of the most beautiful books I have ever read

Beautiful. Romano is, for me, the Italian Annie Ernaux

Has a subtle beauty. It is in this depiction of a literary intimacy that blurs the boundary between fiction and biography that In Farthest Seas truly impresses