I figli dell’istante

Everything can happen in an instant. Fathers can refuse to be parents, love can be revealed or broken, a little girl can despise childhood by behaving more seriously than any adult. Suspended in an eternal present, the protagonists of this novel embody all our contradictions, reflecting back to us like a mirror what we do not want to see. It is the dawn of the 1980s, and around Nico Quell, a fickle young man with no qualities who is leaving for military service, and Nanni Zingone, the friend who has taken on the responsibility of keeping his young family together, moves a company of irresistible characters like fragments of a lost masterpiece. The most hedonistic decade unfolds in these pages, revealing an iridescent humanity, gazing out from the terraces of a cathedral or the top of a volcano, in office cubicles or at the bedside of a delirious old man. How can we explore every possible connection between them? And so, in this sprawling book, we follow the diaspora along the Italian peninsula of professors and soldiers, nobody’s daughters and au pairs, terrorist gangs, magicians, authoritarian mothers-in-law and unattainable models. A swarm of fireflies that, for a moment, illuminates scenes of love and its opposite, and then redemption and downfall, the inexhaustible search for joy even in everyday frustrations. The result is a colourful and hypnotic work that weaves together the threads of our lives with disarming clarity.