UN BENE AL MONDO

Happiness comes quicker, if you trust the pain you feel. By one of the most respected and award-winning novelists of contemporary Italian literature, a novel of love and growing-up of rare emotional power and ferocious and moving candor.

There’s a boy, a loyal and sweet pain that accompanies him everywhere, and a thin girl who takes care of them. A story that is the essence of all the stories. The world is made of few and small things. It is made of places that look the same: all you need is a home, a piazza, a school, a graveyard. And a railway line to make you think you can go away, And, of course, it is made of people, with small and big dreams: have somebody to love, try to be happy, find a place where the pain you feel doesn’t cause you to be ashamed. This novel tells the story of a town at the foot of a mountain, close to the border. There are few streets and a railway line that splits it in two. But it is above all about boy, about his unhappy parents and about a pain that are with him always, a pain that is playmate and life, that lies down in his chair during dinner, ran with him through the woods, and accompanies it to where childhood ends. And it also tells the story of a thin little girl with knees like biscuits who lives on the other side of the railway. Un bene al mondo is a story of love and growing-up of overwhelming intensity and beauty. It is endowed with the power of the great novels and the touching delicacy of fables. Indeed, it is the story of everyone who discovers this secret: if you allow the pain you have inside to help you then that little thing called happiness will come. Quicker. «In the letters he didn’t send to the girl, the boy used few words and would fill them with commas. Because commas were like the beat of the eyelashes: they made things rest a while from being seen all the time.» Andrea Bajani was born in Rome in 1975. With Einaudi he has published Cordiali saluti (2005), Se consideri le colpe (2007) awarded with many literary prizes and Super Mondello Prize, Ogni promessa (2010) Bagutta Prize, and La vita non è in ordine alfabetico (2014) Settembrini Prize. His works are translated by prestigious European publishers as Gallimard in France, Atheneum in Netherlands, DTV-Premium in Germany, MacLehose Press in UK and Siruela in Spain.