The House on Via Gemito

Domenico Starnone

£10.99

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Europa Editions
21 March 2024
ISBN: 9781787705463
Paperback
464 pages

From the publisher

Translated by Oonagh Stransky

Longlisted for the INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE 2024
Winner of the STREGA PRIZE

The extraordinary novel that confirmed Domenico Starnone as one of the greatest writers in modern Italian literature

The modest apartment in Via Gemito smells of paint and white spirit. The living room furniture is pushed up against the wall to create a make-shift studio, and drying canvases must be moved off the beds each night. 

Federí, the father, a railway clerk, is convinced of possessing great artistic talent. If he didn’t have a family to feed, he’d be a world-famous painter. Ambitious and frustrated, genuinely talented but full of arrogance and resentment, his life is marked by bitter disappointment. His long-suffering wife and their four sons bear the brunt.

It's his first-born who, years later, will sift the lies from the truth to tell the story of a man he spent his whole life trying not to resemble. 

Narrated against the background of a Naples still marked by WWII and steeped in the city’s language and imagery, The House on Via Gemito – first published 20 years ago - is a masterpiece of contemporary Italian literature.