Wrong Destination

From one of Italy’s greatest living novelists, a razor-sharp novel about the fragility of all that appears solid in life and the unpredictable consequences of desire. 

The man narrating this story is thirty-eight years old, has been married for more than ten years to Livia—a fascinating, career-driven woman—with whom he has three children. He is as certain of his love and loyalty as one is of a natural law. That is, until one afternoon, while looking after the children while his wife attends a conference, and, at the same time exchanging work messages with Claudia, the colleague with whom he writes TV scripts, he makes a simple mistake: he sends Claudia an “I love you” that was meant for Livia.  

Unexpectedly, Claudia takes the message as the declaration she has long been waiting for. It would seem easy enough to clear up the misunderstanding, but a moment’s hesitation is enough for everything to move inexorably forward, and for a new—or perhaps only latent—possibility to take root in the protagonist’s mind. Was it really a simple mistake or the surfacing of some deep desire? 

The woman who until a few minutes earlier had always been the object of a distracted glance gradually becomes the object of desire. And for that desire, the protagonist suddenly seems ready to question everything: his hitherto irreproachable fidelity as a husband, his reliability as a father, an order painstakingly built. 

With a light touch that belies the abyss beneath, Starnone delivers a tightly cadenced novel that revolves around the themes of family and relationships, of the perilousness of a desire capable of shattering a fragile equilibrium. As comic and absurd as it is tragic and profound, Wrong Destination is a novel about how the smallest actions, and even thoughts, can explode an existence in which we believed ourselves happy.