Anna

Einaudi 2015

Imagine a Sicily as mysterious as a forgotten continent, where there is no electricity and wild dogs follow you on the highway. A ruthless virus has exterminated the adults and left the youth alive. In this world of cadavers and useless objects, the children play, fight and love. And now imagine Anna, thirteen years old, and Astor, her eight-year-old brother. They inherited a prodigious desire to survive and a notebook in which their mother gave them instructions on how to do so.

Few writers have known how to recount the fragility of destiny, opening it wide before our eyes with all its naked biological energy. But no one has incarnated it with so much softness in the gaze of a thirteen-year-old, marvelously stubborn in her ability to sniff out, like an animal, every possibility for survival. In a primitive landscape shorn of the civility warmth, Anna, her brother and a large dog set out on an initiatory voyage through roads and forests, malls and houses falling apart, in quest for an obscure happiness. With "Anna", Niccolò Ammaniti has written his most ambitious and heart-rending novel. A miraculous homage to life.