Premio Elsa Morante 2012
Premio Bottari Lattes Grinzane 2013
Premio Giacomo Matteotti 2013
International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award 2016 – Nominee

From the novel, a tv movie produced by Fandango TV in collaboration with Rai Fiction starring Kasia Smutniak, winner of the Roma Fiction Fest award for best actress

“What is remarkable about Limbo… is the dreaminess it brings to a story of brutality and the defiance with which it upends the conventions that have come to define the war stories of our time.”
The Daily Beast

“Mazzucco (Vita) dazzles in her latest novel, treating readers to a wonderfully paced love story set against a backdrop of modern warfare… Her training as a soldier means her assessments are clear-eyed and unsentimental, which only adds to their emotional weight. Mazzucco’s finely drawn portraits of soldiers are excellent, but her aim is broader: a love story for rational people, providing complex answers to universal questions about recovering from trauma.”
Publishers Weekly (Read full Review)

A novel about losing yourself in a war and finding yourself in love.

It’s Christmas Eve and twenty-seven-year-old Manuela Paris is returning home to a seaside town outside Rome. Years ago, she left to become a soldier. Then, Manuela was fleeing an unhappy, rebellious adolescence; with anger, determination, and sacrifice she painstakingly built the life she dreamed of as a platoon commander in the Afghan desert.
Now, she’s fleeing something else entirely: the memory of a bloody attack that left her seriously injured. Her wounds have plunged her into in a very different and no less insidious war: against flashbacks, disillusionment, pain, and victimhood.
Numb and adrift, she is startled to life by an encounter with a mysterious stranger, a man without a past who is, like her, suspended in his own private limbo of expectation and hope. Their relationship—confusing, invigorating—forces her to confront her past and the secrets she, and those closest to her, are hiding.
In chapters that toggle between Manuela at home, grappling with her new life, and Manuela in Afghanistan, coming to terms with her role as a leader of fighting men and a peacemaker in a country that doesn’t seem to want her help, Melania G. Mazzucco limns a story of love and loss, death and resistance in terms both surprising and cathartic. Limbo asks its readers, no less than its protagonist, what it means to be a daughter, a sister, a woman, a citizen, a soldier—or, more simply, a human.