Italy

Andrea Bajani’s short novel The Anniversary won Italy’s Premio Strega prize last year and has since become an international bestseller. It is narrated by a 51-year-old man who, ten years earlier, cut all ties with his family, and who, on the anniversary of that audacious and purifying move, looks back and tries to make sense of the events that led to it. It is a deliberately simple story, of considerable and radiating power. In tight, short chapters, a portrait builds up of a family dominated by an abusive father. References accumulate less to incidents than to the overwhelming atmosphere of dread between those incidents, ‘the looming threat that tightens our throats’; ‘a constant sense of impending danger...

In ‘Ward 9’, the central story of Will Self’s lauded debut collection, The Quantity Theory of Insanity (1991), it is posited that a society can only contain a finite supply of sanity, and that when it comes to marbles we’re all playing a zero-sum game. His latest novel suggests a limited amount of morality must exist in a world where the avaricious prosper and the meek inherit the debts of those who live unscrupulous lives. In the milieu of the book, these debts are mainly school fees, coke bills and the cost of renting an Italian villa for two weeks every summer.

‘Pinball games, with their flashing lights and unforgettable names, are the one thread that runs together my otherwise fragmentary life.’ So writes Andreas Bernard in the last sentence of this touchingly Proustian memoir. He hymns a life spent flipping small steel balls up and down machines which, despite their clamorous lights, bleeps and honks, amounted to glorified beer coasters and ashtrays, usually in dank corners next to the toilets of some German bar, Italian resort arcade or glum rest stop on California’s Pacific highway. The subtitle is misleading: the book is Bernard’s biography, not the pinball machine’s. He begins his tale as a pre-pubescent, sneaking into Munich bars with his chum Stefan to play these captivating games.

Olivia Laing has had a productive couple of years. The Silver Book arrives hot on the heels of The Garden Against Time, a memoir-cum-environmentalist treatise published in 2024. It is a novel of stunning imaginative power that was apparently written in just three months. Set in 1975, during the making of two great works of Italian cinema, Federico Fellini’s Casanova and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, it is suffused with the glamour and intrigue of these filmmakers’ worlds. It offers a fictional retelling of the events that led up to Pasolini’s murder – a crime that remains unsolved – on 2 November.