General Fiction

Avrò cura di te

(I’ll Watch over You)

Casa Editrice Longanesi&C., November 2014, pp.200

A novel crafted by 4 hands: over 500,000 copies sold

“But that’s exactly what your job is, guardian angel: help her to navigate the narrow path that descends from the head to the guts and rises again from the guts all the way to the heart.”

“There is only one way to overcome pain, Gio’. Accept it and move on. An act of faith in life is required. The reward will be a treasure island: the discovery of an unknown part of one’s inner self.”

Gioconda, known as Giò, is thirty-five years old with a complicated family background behind her, a soul troubled by vocation, or perhaps by necessity, and just one great love: Leonardo – who has abandoned her.
Lost and despairing, she finds herself living at her grandparents’ house. They died within a few days of each other, a symbol of a perfect love, able to make passion triumph over the passing of time: just what Giò’s marriage lacked. On the night of Valentine’s Day, a celebration she’s always ignored, Giò finds a note written by her grandmother to her guardian angel, thanking it. With the despondency, but also the courage of someone with nothing to lose, Giò tries it: she writes to her angel as well. Incredibly, the angel replies and makes her a promise: I’ll watch over you.
Not only does the angel have an extremely strong personality, it also has a name, Filémone, and a story. Above all, it has the ability to understand Giò as she’s never understood herself, and to listen to her as she’s never listened to herself. So is born an intense, amusing, amused and moving exchange which also involves the people around Giò: the meticulous ex-husband, the bizarre mother, the friend caught in an extra-marital affair, and the boy who wants to join a commune.
This exchange doesn’t only examine Giò’s missing motives, but our own, as well. It encourages us to silence our heads and our instincts, in order to listen to our hearts. Especially when they are called to face difficult tests, like the one Giò is confronted with by her faithful Filémone, in a surprising finale which seems to confuse everything, when in fact it will make everything clear.

Casa Editrice Longanesi&C., November 2014, pp.200

  • “An intense collection of letters, in which each exchange between the characters is like an emergency unit for the soul.”

    TV Sorrisi e Canzoni

  • “A book that hits you straight in the heart because it talks of the difficulty of living.”

    Corriere di Bologna

  • “Do you want to find yourself? Search for you guardian angel. De te fabula narratur: it is your story that is being told (lovingly) in this tale, dear reader.”

    Giovanni Pacchiano, Sette

  • “An emergency unit for broken hearts, a vitaminic dose of self-awareness, a therapy of optimistic willpower.”

    Luciano Genta, TTL

Massimo Gramellini

Massimo Gramellini is a journalist and television presenter. Since 2017 he has been writing for Il Corriere della Sera, of which he is a deputy editor. Since 2016 he has has been hosting the RAI 3 TV programme Le parole della settimana. With Longanesi, he has published the essays Ci salveranno gli ingenui (The Innocents Will Save Us, 2007), Cuori allo specchio (Hearts at the Mirror, 2008), La magia di un Buongiorno (The Magic of a ‘Good Morning’, 2014) and the bestselling novels L’ultima riga delle favole (The Final Line of Fairy Tales, 2010) and Fai bei sogni (Sweet Dreams, 2012), which sold over a million and a half copies and has been translated into 22 languages. In 2019, he published Prima che tu venga al mondo (Before You Come into the World).

Chiara Gamberale

Chiara Gamberale was born in 1977 at Rome, where she lives. Her debut was with Una vita sottile (A Slender Life) (Marsilio, 1999). Her writings include the international bestseller Le luci nelle case degli altri (Lights in other people’s houses, Mondadori 2010), Per dieci minuti (For ten minutes, Feltrinelli 2013),  Avrò cura di te, with Massimo Gramellini (Longanesi, 2014), Adesso (2016) and  Qualcosa (2017). As well as being an author, she works as a presenter on television and radio programs. She has collaborated with “La Stampa”, “Vanity Fair”, “Io Donna” and “Donna moderna”.

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