LE LUCI NELLE CASE DEGLI ALTRI

Maria, the communal administrator of an apparently normal building, dies in a car accident. She leaves a daughter, Mandorla (literally "Almond"), a six years old girl whose future turns out to be as strange as her name is: a letter her mother left before dying reveals that her real father lives in one of the 5 floors of the building. All the men in the building are therefore suspected, and one of them is expected to be admitting the truth. However, since none accepts to undergo the DNA test, the 5 families decide to grow up the little girl together.

Through Mandorla's sometimes happy, sometimes sweetly desperate eyes, we turn on the lights (and thus see the shelters) in the apartments of the building apartments where the reader will find his place as well. We will thus investigate on the reasons of the solitude of Tina Polidoro; we will step into the desolate bedroom of Caterina and Samuele Grò; we will follow Paolo and Michelangelo to the gay pride; we will be overwhelmed by the incommunicability in the tormented relationship between Lidia and Lorenzo; we will sit at the Barilla family's table, so stubbornly traditional.

While Mandorla grows up, falls in love, sarches her father and her true self, we get through astonishing revelations and uncomfortable truths. While reading, we will all remember that, before being wives, husbands, mothers and fathers, we are -above all- persons. Beautiful and dreadful at the same time, and all hiding a childhood that threatens to hunt us forever.

And we will all find out that "family" constitutes an indefinable alchemy: the ones who've got one end up destroying it; the ones who don't have it dream of it as the only possible means of happiness. Chiara Gamberale builds up a novel where traditional archetypes mix with contemporary dramas, where truth and lie interchange, and gives birth to an original and unforgivable voice that leads us to a surprising ending.

Chiara Gamberale was born in 1977. She holds a degree in Film History from the University of Bologna and has published two novels with Marsilio: Una vita sottile (1999) and Color lucciola (2001) and Arrivano i pagliacci (Bompiani, 2003). She contributes to "La Stampa", "Il Riformista" and Vanity Fair"