Santa

Saint

I used to go to sleep with a load of bullets in my stomach, and as soon as I woke up, I was already halfway out of breath, with tachycardia, goosebumps, and I knew I needed love, I know it, but love, love is disarming. Hate, on the other hand, hate is a license to carry weapons.

Santa (Saint) was born in a small village on the seaside in Calabria, in the deep South of Italy, where life is immobile and still rooted in the archaic and absurd traditions of the province and the sound of sea waves. Hers is not a loving and encouraging family. She grew up trying to escape from a mother who always preferred her spoiled and domineering older sister, and from a loving father who was submissive to these dynamics. Santa, indeed, has a primordial force in her, a strength that – equally to her fragility – frightens and repels those around her. She has only one dream: to be loved and thus happy. So she decides to escape from a place that oppresses her and moves to Piedmont with Gianni, her former high school classmate. In the new city, with her job as a wedding hairstyle model and the birth of her son Thomas, she thinks she is ready for the future and one step closer to happiness. Even from the outside her life looks enviable, many women look up to her in her perfect hairstyles and wedding dresses and wish to be like her. Little do they know what she hides inside and how far she can go. A series of causes will set off a chain of events that will lead her to make a shocking and unpredictable decision and overturn everything “toxic” in her life. Rosanna Turone’s protagonist is ruthlessly honest, cruel and light-years away from conventional norms and anything accommodating, anything compliant, associated with femininity by her family. Santa does not hold back from making merciless decisions and refuses to accept a fate she did not choose. With a dizzying, raw and poetic style, Turone guides us into a world where love is refuge but also poison, and where frailty is more dangerous than force, with a strikingly original and breathtaking literary debut.