Literary Fiction

Gli affamati

(Craving)

Ponte alle Grazie, July 2020, pp.176

3 editions

Best debut for Lectures Plurielles, Festival du premier roman de Chambéry 

English sample available

A quality debut novel, powerful language that bluntly narrates the lives of two frail, damaged brothers, the victims of seclusion and degradation, tortured by a sense of guilt that rules over their lives, and which they must face.

In the imaginary outskirts of a tiny Sicilian village, Antonio and Paolo, two brothers aged nineteen and twenty-two, have been living alone since their father died and their mother left home. Together, they have built an everyday routine that apparently works despite its extreme precariousness, a present in which, however, there is no room for developing future projects and they are constantly overwhelmed by the struggle for survival. It is the summer. Antonio is looking for a job and Paolo trying to keep his. Hallucinating nights with friends, parties, days spent by the sea, evenings of drink, sex and drugs. Then, one seemingly quiet day, something snaps. As though by some petty astral conspiracy, old skeletons leap out of the cupboard and shallowly buried past demons resurface: the young men’s mother returns after running away from her violent husband years earlier, an old, a dormant love comes knocking at the door of one of the brothers and crimes never atoned appear on the horizon of the other…

Ponte alle Grazie, July 2020, pp.176

  • “Reading Mattia Insolia means looking at the world with one foot in the abyss.  But there is hope in this black fresco: the abundant piety in the writing of this young author who in the end redeems the hell he depicts and shines a light on a possible way out.”

    Crocifisso Dentello, writer

  • “The astonishing novel of a very young and yet already mature writer.”

    Teresa Ciabatti, writer screenwriter and journalist

  • “Biting, incisive, powerful, immediate: that’s his writing.”

    La Sicilia

  •  “Mattia Insolia is only twenty-five and he has already written a practically perfect novel.”

    Giulia Ciarapica, Il Foglio

  • “A debut novel that’s as angry as it is good and relatable.”

    Alessandro Berretta, "La Lettura", Il Corriere della Sera

  • “A cutting and intense style.”

    L’Eco di Bergamo

  •  “Mattia Insolia has written a novel brimming with life, that reveals a reality suspended between perdition and salvation.”

    Giuseppe Lorenti, "Il Venerdì", La Repubblica

  • “An intense story, full of details that are so precise and painful they seem truly lived.”

    Teresa Ciabatti, "7-Sette", Il Corriere della Sera

  • ”Mattia Insolia’s literary debut is astonishing, the kind that leave you breathless, that brings out tears and confirms that your official age doesn’t count, but that spark and talent can burst out without prior notice

    Huffington Post

  • “A promising voice coming through and that will go far.”

    Nadia Terranova, "Tuttolibri", La Stampa

Rights Sold

Germany: Karl Rauch Verlag

 

Film rights optioned

Mattia Insolia

Mattia Insolia was born in Sicily in 1995. After graduating in Literature from Rome University, he studied Publishing and wrote short stories for a variety of anthologies. Over the years, he has written for various culture magazines and is now a literary and film critic for the Milanese publication L’Indiependente.

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