The most exciting Italian literature I’m currently pitching
Lord of the Waters by Giuseppe Zucco — Nutrimenti, 2025
Reminiscent of José Saramago’s Blindness and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, this dystopian cli-fi novel told by a ten-year-old boy in which the sky fills up with water as the world can do nothing but wait for its impending doom is a rare gem in the Italian literary landscape and would fit perfectly in the catalogue of literary-minded publishers wanting to dip their toes into speculative fiction.
Literary dystopian sci-fi
Ten-year-old protagonist with a strong, disturbing voice
Surprising images that will delight and nauseate the reader
A wonderful reflection on the end of childhood
A moving meditation on the meaning of life
For fans of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, José Saramago’s Blindness, and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road
Read an excerpt, find out more, or reach out to chat about it.
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In this brief novel, the world is devastated by an unexplained phenomenon: it no longer rains, and water is accumulating in the sky like an upside-down ocean. Humanity is paralysed into inaction, and no one knows what to do, including the parents of the young boy narrating the story.
Falling prey to panic, the father orders his wife and son to barricade themselves at home while the mother attempts to keep everyone’s mood as high as possible. Though it is fun to throw all rules out of the window for a while, soon an odd strangeness starts creeping into their days: the house is in utter disarray, the small family only eats junk food, and eventually the parents even encourage the boy to take up smoking.
As tension continues to rise, the boy decides to run away from home. In the senseless Armageddon unfolding outside his front door, he meets feral, ruthless people, witnesses violence and death, and gets to know the basest instincts of human beings.
Eventually, his parents find him, rescue him, and take him home, but things are far from back to normal. Food is scarce, and the end is looming ever closer. But a little pet – a goldfish – brings some happiness to the distraught boy and his family, though this is only a brief respite before the water in the sky comes crashing down on the earth for good. And yet, perhaps, some hope endures.
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With an original style and hypnotic rhythm, Zucco grasps the moment when innocence meets the chaos of the world - Satisfiction
A journey to discover who we are when everything falls apart and what binds us to life – Style
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This is a stunning speculative novel that is as terrifying as it is heartwarming.
The book is steeped in a wonderfully disturbing sense of something being ‘off’ that permeates its every aspect, from the plot to the narrator’s voice, and contributes to an all-encompassing sense of cognitive dissonance.
This novel is exquisitely literary, with inventive language and surprising images that will delight and nauseate the reader in equal measure. However, when scratching under the surface, it quickly becomes evident that the book really is a simply wonderful reflection on that apocalyptic trauma that is the end of childhood.
But it goes even further than that: over the last few pages, a different meaning starts to emerge, almost Buddhist-like in its scope. It is here that, as readers, we realise the novel is truly about what it means to live life knowing that, one day, we will die. The ever-so-slow advance of the water from above takes on a new meaning: the apocalypse is coming for each and every one of us. So how do we live a full life knowing what we know?
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Macaco by Simone Torino — Einaudi, 2025
Three friends and a potato field, with the Valle d’Aosta and its mountains all around them. Macaco is a farmhand who is also a bit of a philosopher. As Macaco ponders nature, love, friendship, ecology, and poetry with his colleagues and friends, Banana and Tomb, in short but very vivid (and hilarious!) chapters, we learn about his life in the ‘margins’, which is also at the very heart of everything. An unforgettable voice for an astonishing novel that won the 2024 Calvino Prize for unpublished manuscripts.
A farming epic with a strong voice
Unusual setting in a little-explored region of Italy
Laugh-out-loud funny
Urgent by unpreaching environmentalist message
A beautiful reflection on masculinity and friendship among men
Read an excerpt, find out more, or reach out to chat about it.
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Macaco’s life pivots around the repetitive motions of his hard work and the extenuating physical effort it requires, his friendship with Banana and Tomb (all nicknames) in what feels like one of the most remote corners of Italy, and the one bar, one restaurant, and one gym in the village. Macaco lives a life that many would probably consider extremely small, limiting, and unsatisfying. Yet, his outlook on life is incredibly deep, penetrating, and all-encompassing.
The plot emerges slowly from short chapters that almost have an anecdotal feel to them: together with Tomb, Macaco helps Banana overcome his alcoholism, which has been destroying his marriage and his life. Then Macaco starts learning sign language to better communicate with Tomb, who was born deaf. And finally, Macaco himself faces the choice between two possible love interests. The sum of these episodes is an unforgettable portrayal of a character with many questions and few answers, yet who has reached an enviable outlook on life.
One way to describe Macaco would be to reach for the trope of the ‘peasant philosopher’. However, he is not an enlightened, entirely at peace, guru-like character, nor has he reached a superior understanding of the human condition. On the contrary, he often feels lonely, shy, and out of place.
Though this novel might very well be called a ‘farming epic’, it certainly is not an idyll outside of time as Macaco battles larger, more modern social issues, such as Banana’s alcoholism, the prejudice that affects Tomb’s life because of his disability, his own loneliness after the end of a relationship, and the use of pesticides that poison the land he loves so much.
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A simple story, moving and funny, told with words as sharp as a shovel - Viola Ardone
A unique voice telling about a world in the margins that felt all but extinct […] A syncopated writing […] that immediately carries the reader into the poetical but down-to-earth universe of the protagonist - Judges’ citation for the 2024 Calvino Prize
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The writing in Macaco is deliciously pithy, which gives the narration a lovely oral lilt that also hints at the silence shared among men who often cannot or choose not to express an opinion.
However, this terseness is also an excellent vehicle for a stripped-back brand of comedy, and the novel is genuinely laugh-out-loud funny.
Macaco is a book I’ve never read before. It is so different from so much Italian literature today, but it’s also quite unlike anything else I’m aware of, which is probably one of the reasons why it was awarded the prestigious Calvino Prize in 2024.
This brief novel will grab the reader from its very first chapter thanks to its terse, succinct, almost self-redacted style and its voice that manages to be, at the same time, dryly ironic and incredibly warm, empathetic, and compassionate.