Missitalia (A Novel)

Three women. Three moments across time.

From international star Claudia Durastanti, Elena Ferrante meets Emily St. John Mandel in a dazzling new novel of Southern Italy, rebels and spies, oil country and the moon, revisionist history and imagined futures.

Amalia Spada is a woman with a restless and daring spirit. In post-reunification Southern Italy, she lives in a house among the ravines of the Lucanian region, a house that has become a refuge for outcasts and runaway rebels and wild girls seeking a new life. When industrialists and a local nobleman push to build a factory nearby, all of their lives are upended, and a shocking act of violence echoes across generations.

In the years after World War II, amidst an energy race, a young woman named Ada explores the Southern Italian region of Basilicata, where vast oil reserves have been discovered. She's looking for magic and love and oil. By turns translator and spy, this apprentice anthropologist is drawn to rural traditions even as they are transformed by the pursuit of black gold.

A hundred years later, Southern Italy has become the base for the colonization of the Moon: the Mediterranean Space Agency's spacecrafts depart from Lucania, bound for the New World. In this futuristic settlement lives A, a solitary and free woman who restores life to objects no one desires anymore. In her past there was a husband, but also the need to venture far away; in her present, she must come to terms with it all ending.

Missitalia tells its own version of history, a story shaped by the magical and elusive figures of three women, connected across ancient and future worlds. At once a feminist saga, a western, and a work of speculative fiction, Missitalia is a novel of striking originality and ambition by one of Italy’s most acclaimed contemporary writers.