QUEL CHE CI TIENE VIVI

From the best-selling author of La vita accanto, a tense and stunning new novel on the value of helping others.

Helping dysfunctional families: this is the purpose of the main character and his wife. He's a lawyer with a painful past difficult to forget but also to remember. Bianca, his wife, is the psycho-analyst he turned to at the very beginning of his career to put the pieces of his childhood back together. They were so different - religious, skinny, vegetarian and refined Bianca, materialistic and disillusioned, overweight, raised alone and in poverty the narrator - yet instead of an analysis, a love was born. Maybe it's because they speak the same language, the language shared only by those who survived indelible trauma but have the courage to stand up and move on. Perhaps it's because they both need to try fix the world. This is what pushes him in and out of the courts to fight with fierce determination: give a chance to people who, as had happened to him, "are unseen." On a winter evening he meets a lonely, cold child who speaks like an adult. A child who disappears and never come back. A child who reminds him of himself. And when he discovers who the kid is, his mission turns into an obsession: he will have to save him. Mariapia Veladiano worked first as a teacher and then as a principal. Her first novel, La vita accanto, won the Calvino Prize and has been shortlisted for Premio Strega in 2011 is being adapted in a feature film by Kavac. Guanda published her essay Parole di scuola and the novels Una storia quasi perfetta, Lei, about Mary of Nàzaret, and Adesso che sei qui (winner of Premio Flaiano 2021). She is a columnist for "La Repubblica" and "Il Regno".