SHORTLISTED FOR PREMIO LATTES GRINZANE 2024

SHORTLISTED FOR PREMIO CAMPIELLO 2024

Orthodox Easter days. Trieste, the city where it is impossible to stay and from which it is lacerating to leave. Alma returns; she has three days. She must recover the inheritance that her father, orphaned by Tito, left to Vili for her.  But Vili is the last person Alma would want to find again.

Three days become the watershed between what was and what will be. The years of a childhood divided between her grandparents' Austro-Hungarian cafes and secret trips with her father to the Yugoslav islands.

And a present where coming to terms with the memory of a war across the border and those same streets where Alma and Vili now try to find their place.

"She would not have been able to tell where she belonged, even her tormented city did not know: they called it a paper city because she always thought of herself as part of a nation that was not her own, imagined Austria, so¬came the Slavs, and even the Garibaldi¬na nation, but then she was estranged from everything and especially from herself."

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"If you want to navigate the anxieties of Italy's eastern frontier 'where geography trumps history', then indulge in reading Alma."

Paolo Rumiz, La Repubblica

"With Alma, Federica Manzon has written a powerful novel with Trieste as its backdrop, where foreignness is a distinctive, stubborn and flaunted trait." 

Mara Gergolet, Corriere della Sera

"In Alma Federica Manzon returns to writing, with a magical talent all her own, of charismatic, silent, restless characters."

Nadia Terranova, La Stampa

"Federica Manzon knows how to paint the fresco of a story whose twists and turns we follow with emotion, infected by an explosive vitality."

Lisa Ginzburg, Avvenire

"Alma is a novel in which past and present do not face each other in a contest between living and remembering, but seek each other out, shot through with nostalgia for what can no longer be." 

Nadeesha Uyangoda, Internazionale

"This is what great novels do. They build a world for us readers to inhabit. They open up space and time for us, and take us elsewhere."

Cristina De Stefano, Elle