Quella vita che ci manca

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.