They meet us with stories that concern us and in which we recognize ourselves The many narrative news of this 2025: generational themes, the family with its complexity, the mysteries of the great history but also of the news, in which to dig again, friendship and love, the topicality, the fragility of the various ages of life and many ideas of reflections In these proposals, only some of the many of a year full of desire to tell each other.
It is also a family story, a painful “interview” with the dead father that of Rodolfo Anzo, a narrative voice of The crocodile of Palermo (The ship of Teseo) by the director and writer Roberto Andò who sets in a Palermo forget about the answers to many mysterious questions.
Inspired by a true story, that of Fiorentina Rossella Casini, victim of the ‘Ndrangheta for having tied herself to a wrong boy, who disappeared in Palmi in 1981 and whose body has never been found, My love does not die (Einaudi) is Roberto Saviano’s new novel “An impossible story, a true story”.
Signature Malbianco (Einaudi) The Apulian writer Mario Desiati Award, a story that leads us to the woods of Taranto in the cold of the German prison camps among the removed silences and the unspoken of the protagonists, spread on those places such as “the malbianco that infested the trunk of trees ».
Silences also removed in The anniversary (Feltrinelli) by Andrea Bajani, who enters the shadows of the family with his taboos and his violence: a painful story with the “liberation of a son from his unfortunate family, a new freedom conquered at the price of difficult choices and an escape from parents.
There is so much need to dig in the past, among the interstices and daily heroisms of the Resistance, and Armenian Retanna does it with In Rome there are no mountains (Ponte alle Grazie) by taking us on sad days (there is also the tragic episode of via Rasella) but also brave of Rome occupied by the Nazis of 1944, where young university students form the “patriotic action groups” and smear weapons for Freedom.
Enters the souls of an entire generation Edoardo Albinati, 2016 Strega Prize, with The children of the instant (Rizzoli). Through Nico and Nanni, with their unresolved anxieties and their choices, in the background founding themes such as work, family, love and betrayal, Italy of the eighties is told.
Instead, it is a story of sentimental, political, sexual education, There was the moon (Einaudi), Serena Dandini’s new novel that goes back to the 60s to revive the spirit of those days through a teenager and her experience, between protests and rebellions, dreams and disappointments, light -heartedness and disenchantment.
There is still a teenager under the narrative lens of Giulia Lombezzi, playwright, screenwriter and teacher of Milanese creative writing (already a finalist at the Calvino 2020 prize) that signs The summer I killed my grandfather (Bollati Boringhieri). The presence of a brutal and manipulator grandfather in the sixteen -year -old family Alice reveals the complex and painful mechanisms that are hidden behind the family “affections”.
Another family story is The young road (Feltrinelli), but who enters the folds of the past the first novel by the actor and director Antonio Albanese, who is inspired by a family story to tell the story of a twenty year old, who in 1944 starting from a prison camp in Austria, walk the entire peninsula on foot to go home, to Sicily.
And it is a Maurizio de Giovanni “new” what signs that signs The ancient love (Mondadori), a novel about love and its forms through two parallel narrative plans that dialogue with each other: on the one hand there is the passion of the Latin poet Catullo with his beautiful burning verses of love and his last hours of Life, on the other the last melancholy years of a professor whose life marked by an intense and absolute love is filtered by the affectionate and respectful gaze of the young caregiver.
Already a finalist at the Strega Prize, the Neapolitan Wanda Marasco, poet and writer, returns to the bookstore with the novel From behind this world (Neri Pozza). A book that traces an extraordinary existence, that of Ferdinando Palasciano, a philanthropist and patriot doctor (he also participated in the uprisings of Messina of 1848), and his wife, the Russian noblewoman Olga de Wawilov, who lived in Naples in the nineteenth century. Before dementia and a form of madness hit him, the theme on which together with the fragility reflects the Marasco.
And stages the meeting between a writer and journalist who must interview Giuseppe Misso, called ‘or Nasone, a mafia boss accused of numerous crimes, Teresa Ciabatti with Donnaregina (Mondadori), a story that brings together different worlds in which for the protagonist there is so much to discover to get to know his own world.
Free and a little bastard (Bompiani) of Rossana Campo is a story of women, friendship, love, sex, freedom. Betti, the protagonist of the novel, is a screenwriter who is at the center of a network of friends, animator of parties and relationships, always struggling with the existential problems and passions of his friends Alice, Gloria, Federica, Sylvie, Lorenza and Leila , with which he has a free and frenetic life in common.
Signature for Sellerio Eleven. Don’t forget Andrej Longo, who joins the Sicilian publishing house with eleven female stories set in Naples and in his suburbs, stories “stolen from the news, to the street, to life”.
And still “disappointed, injuries, poisoned”, in Dance on me (SEM) Massimo Carlotto who through the history of four women prisoner of a life that oppresses them, describes the complexity of an Italy full of contradictions but also of beauty.