Literary Fiction

Cara pace

(Dear Peace)

Ponte alle Grazie, September 2020, pp.256

Longlisted Strega Prize 2021

over 25,000 copies sold

Winner Chianti Prize

A happy family. An imploding couple. Two sisters, a mother who leaves.

An unbreakable bond that helps overcome pain.

An intimate, feminine novel brimming with light.

French sample available

Maddalena, the elder, is shy, serious and reserved. Nina, only slightly younger, is attractive, unpredictable, charming, difficult and a prisoner of her own egocentricity. The two sisters built their childhood and adolescence around a deep void, an absence that’s hard to accept. Even now, after many years, they try to fill it with running, long walks, volleys of words and WhatsApp messages which, from Paris to New York, always end up taking them back to Rome, to a house with a terrace overlooking Villa Pamphili, where their strange, symbiotic and wild life took shape. It’s to Rome that Maddi, forever huddled in her shell, decides to return, fleeing the roles that, first her sister, then her family, have imposed on her. Alone at last with herself and her memories, she drops her defences and, as she relives the locations of the past, swaps parts and opens up to life’s surprises.

A story of love and abandonment which, like all life stories, presents only questions without answers. Moreover, it uses the happy yardstick of literature to measure the distance between the original injury and the peace always and only experienced in maturity.

Ponte alle Grazie, September 2020, pp.256

  • “This is the time to pick up ‘Cara pace’ to experience the magic created by the books that ask to be read.”

    Annalena Benini, il Foglio

  • “A refined analysis that Lisa Ginzburg conducts with a confident hand.”

    Alessandro Zaccuri, Avvenire

  • “A limpid talent.”

    Emiliano Reali, il Mattino

  • “impeccable, very measured writing that’s occasionally almost cold, but it’s what makes it lyrical and evocative.”

    Mary B. Tolusso, il Piccolo

  • “Ginzburg shows us skilfully how every identity is the larger sum of a series of sometimes indistinct or invisible relationships.”

    Teresa Fasano, il Sole 24 ore

  • “Lisa Ginzburg has woven this relationship with grace and moderation, using her ability to probe deeply the cracks in relationships.”

    Cristina Taglietti, Corriere della sera/La Lettura

  • “Lisa Ginzburg is brilliant at carrying us, from the very first page, into the heart of hardship and loss, and leading us into the complexity of an unfathomable core.”

    Nadia Terranova, Robinson Repubblica

  • “Two sisters, a mother who leaves. Lisa Ginzburg probes the fragility of a couple, amid the family debris, and describes with ingenious skill the female struggle to grow up protecting others and herself – and then surprises us with the theory that it’s by throwing away the shield that you understand the battle better.”

    Domenico Starnone

  • “This story of belonging has truly admirable elegance and depth.”

    Marco Balzano

Rights Sold

Brazil: Nos editora; France: Verdier; Germany: nonsolo verlag; World Spanish Rights: Tres Hermanas.

Lisa Ginzburg

Lisa Ginzburg lives and works in Paris. She studied at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, where she specialised in 17th-century French mysticism. Her published works include: Desiderava la bufera (Feltrinelli, 2006), Colpi d’ala (Feltrinelli, 2006), Per amore (Marsilio, 2016) and Pura invenzione, as well as Dodici variazioni su Frankenstein di Mary Shelley (Marsilio, 2018).

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