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A heart wrenching love story between east and west, set against the backdrop of the Balkan Wars, from the Seventies to the present day. Federica Manzon

Trieste, April 2022, the days of Orthodox Easter.

Alma is 53 years old, born and raised in Trieste, and like the city she is blond, blue-eyed, has long stork-like legs and a windy, rebellious air in her face. She left Trieste when she was 25. In Rome she built a life as a journalist, but she has always felt a fierce longing for her world back. Now Alma is forced to return to retrieve the mysterious legacy her father - a man full of charm but elusive, who came and went across the border, without ever being sure of his return - left for her in the hands of Vili Knežević. Vili, who is to Alma something like a brother or an antagonist, however, is the last person she would want to see again. Over the three days of Orthodox Easter, as Alma searches for the courage to meet Vili, Trieste opens wide as a map of her life. The beautiful house where she spent her childhood thanks to her maternal grandparents, with whom Alma passed afternoons at the San Marco café speaking "in German and in the dialect of the city," each time being catapulted "into an era light years away from the unstable disorder of her house, into a world where people spoke in low voices and ironed their sheets.” Then, all of a sudden, her family had moved into the house on the Karst and Vili had arrived. Vili, the son of two Belgrade intellectuals who were friends of her father. Vili whom his father had brought home without explanation, leaving him to live with them. Now it is from the hands of Vili, that little boy who has been "a brother, a friend, an antagonist," that Alma must receive her father’s inheritance. But it’s difficult seeing him again, the last time they were together was in Belgrade, on the wrong side of the war, and Alma had misunderstood many things.

Federica Manzon writes a novel where identity, memory and History – of families and countries – are constantly sought and eluded, making that border city, Trieste, a universal point of view from which to look at the war of yesterday and today, the borders that are changing, our difficult attempts to understand who we are, what our identity is and where is home. 

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READ HERE AN EXCERPT IN ENGLISH (PDF)

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"So, let yourselves be carried away by the reading of 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 confront each other in a contest between living and remembering. Instead, they seek each other out, imbued with nostalgia for what can no longer be".

Nadeesha Uyangoda, Internazionale

"I read a wonderful book. I underlined every page. It is called Alma".

Concita De Gregorio, la Repubblica 

"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

"Among the literary testimonies inspired by the former Yugoslavia, Manzon's story is the most beautiful and compelling. In the first lines there is the island, there is the woman and 'is the windy city, three feminine, closed game".

Adriano Sofri, Il Foglio Review

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

Massimo Giannini, la Repubblica

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