Angelica was disfigured in an accident. Tommaso is destined to go blind.
Two fragile souls, two wounded people. A love story that goes against everyone and everything.

English sample available

Angelica, a roman student reading Law, is offered the chance to spend her summer holidays in her grandfather’s magnificent villa in the countryside, and she is thrilled. Thrilled because her goal is to hide from the rest of the world: aged 20, Angelica is scarred for life not only in her soul, but on the rest of her body too, after a car accident during which she lost her mother.
Tommaso is able to find her however; after a fortuitous meeting, which he can’t seem to forget, he decides to take her photographs with his Polaroid. This is the only tool that enables him to see the world clearly, since a degenerative illness affecting his eyes is plunging him into darkness.
In those photos, Angelica is beautiful, and bears no scars: Tommaso falls in love with her and thanks to his contagious cheerfulness he succeeds in overcoming her resistance and breaking down her barriers.
But just when it seems happiness is within their reach, a dark night envelops them, pushes them apart and triggers a series of painful events from which no one will come out unscathed. Only those who can find their way in the dark.

pp.384

This is a novel about love, a merciless love of the kind that can only exist between brothers and sisters. But it’s also a novel about the first and only kind of love that can compete with it: the love which erupts like darkness in a room full of light, between a boy and a girl, against everything and everyone.

English extract available

January 1991. Valentino observes the little clouds of breath which die on the clouded windows of the old car he inherited from his father, dead for several years. It’s not the only thing left of him: there’s also the idea that a different life might be possible.
But perhaps Valentine is too much like the place where he lives: the Fort, an occupied quarter ruled by dust, where the asphalt is cracked, and even your house can be taken away if you get distracted for a moment. There’s only one thing left to hang on to: family.
Valentino is the youngest of the four Smeraldi children, all children of different fathers.
There’s Anna, who at only thirty years of age no longer has anything to ask from life. There’s Vadim, handsome but somehow not right, with the mind of twelve-year old in the body of a twenty-year-old. There’s Alan, the oldest, the man of the house, possessed of a rage as ferocious as his love for his family, who must remain united at all costs.
But the cost could be too high for Valentino, because now there’s her: Delia. She’s older than him and stunningly beautiful – but you only realise at second or third glance – and she’s clean, because she’s not from the Fort.
And that’s just the problem, because Valentine is hiding a secret that he doesn’t dare confess and, worse, he feels that to choosing her would mean betraying his family – betraying Alan.
And Alan doesn’t forgive.

pp.250