RANDAGI

Set between Pisa, the Tuscany and Madrid, RANDAGI is an original novel, with a wide narrative scope. Through the eyes and the personal parable of its young protagonist, Pietro Benati, the novel tells the story of a Tuscan family that has fallen into disgrace, and then it widens its gaze to an entire generation (the millennials) portraying its complexity, restlessness, disappointment and anger.

In Pisa, in an apartment full of paintings and musical instruments overlooking the Leaning Tower, Pietro Benati is waiting to disappear. According to his mother, a curse hangs over their family: sooner or later all the males of the Benati's family sneak away and Pietro - the youngest son, a loner with no particular qualities - will be no exception. The first was his grandfather, missing during the war in Ethiopia and repatriated the following year in disgrace. The second, in 1988, was his father: an inveterate gambler, Berto disappeared for a month and returned home without a finger. When a scandal breaks out in the family, Pietro is sure that his turn is coming. Instead the one vanishing into thin air is his older brother Tommaso, a promising soccer player, a mathematical genius and the only person Pietro can really rely on. Once again, nothing happens to Pietro. No matter how hard he tries with his musical career, university or girls, no matter that he changes city and country, going to Madrid, his life remains an indecipherable succession of failures and disappointments. At least until he meets two creatures as vagrant and confused as he is: Laurent, a French expat with a penchant for night swimming and alcohol, and Dora, a Spanish horror movie enthusiast hiding a grief opposite to his own. And, alongside them, Pietro finally lights up. With a plot full of lively and moving characters, Randagi is a dazzling novel about youth and those very fragile bonds able to change our lives. Winner of the Bagutta Prize for his first work, Amerighi gives us a fresco that restores all the complexity of a generation: wounded, disappointed and uprooted from the world, but not yet willing to give up. Marco Amerighi lives in Milan, where he works as a translator, editor and ghostwriter. Le nostre ore contate, his debut novel (Mondadori, 2018), won the Bagutta Opera Prima prize and was published in France. Randagi is his second novel.