Playtime is Over, a bold literary masterpiece, traversing from Pisa to Paris against the violent backdrop of Italy’s ‘Years of Lead’, moves effortlessly between sharpwitted satirical campus novel, fictional biography, and epic noir, provoking laughter and tender compassion as it unravels into a profound meditation on political memory, the impossibility of biography, and personal responsibility.

Why I Love This Book

Without a doubt the best contemporary Italian novel I’ve read in recent years, this incredibly well-written book had me absorbed from the beginning. There are three qualities in particular that make this novel a work of exceptional literary merit that deserves to be translated for a broader readership. The first is the remarkable architecture of the novel itself. What begins as a highly amusing campus novel gradually transforms via the protagonist’s research into a fictional biographical investigation and historical novel set in the revolutionary underground of 1970s Italy, with each layer of the story illuminating and refracting the others. The result is a reading experience that is simultaneously gripping and intellectually scintillating.

Secondly, the novel’s structural ambition is matched by its tonal range; Ferrari moves fluidly between sharp comedy, pathos, suspense, and moments of genuine moral weight, without ever losing his footing. The novel also effortlessly weaves in very authentic human characters, their struggles, and relationships, and I was personally struck by the moments of family conflict and tension. As a reader and translator, I was consistently amazed by how convincingly he inhabits such different registers and time periods – from the absurdist but authentic tone of Marcello’s academic misadventures to the atmospheric darkness of 1970s political violence, and I was often compelled even to believe that Tito Sella had indeed been a real revolutionary figure.

Finally, the third quality is Ferrari’s portrayal of passivity as a moral and political condition. At the heart of the novel is a devastating meditation on what it means not to act — and on the costs, for oneself and for others, of allowing inertia to substitute for choice. This theme runs across both the historical narrative of the Years of Lead and the contemporary story of Marcello’s drift through academia and life. What makes it resonate so powerfully, and what gives the novel its particular urgency in the present moment, is that it refuses to let passivity off the hook. In a world where atrocities are explicitly allowed to happen unchecked, the gravity of passive inaction is not merely a philosophical question but an ethical one with real consequences. Ferrari dramatises this with great subtlety and without didacticism.

This book will be greatly loved by readers of ambitious literary fiction, particularly those who enjoy novels that combine intellectual depth with propulsive storytelling. Comparable to The Idiot by Elif Batuman and Possession by A.S. Byatt for its employment of academic satire, meta-narrative, and the tension between life and literary framing. There are also echoes of The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco in its literary detective qualities, and of Roberto Bolaño in its treatment of political violence as both history and myth. Ferrari’s novel sits comfortably in the tradition of the great campus novel while transcending its conventions entirely. Playtime is Over is a novel of rare ambition and accomplishment — at once a brilliantly entertaining read and a work of serious literary and historical substance. I believe it has exceptional potential, and I would be honoured to have the opportunity to translate this novel and bring it to a new audience.

Synopsis

Marcello is a mediocre literature student at the University of Pisa who stumbles into a PhD programme seemingly almost by accident — a consequence not of merit but of unlikely circumstance. His advisor, the formidable and enigmatic Professor Sacrosanti, assigns him to research Tito Sella, a writer Marcello quickly discovers was an alleged and convicted terrorist during the tumultuous period of radical political violence that gripped Italy in the 1970s, known as the Anni di piombo (Years of Lead).

The novel opens as a richly comical satire of academia as Marcello drifts passively through the absurdities of campus life, egos and political games. The narrative then gradually expands through a nested, Chinese-box structure, and through Marcello’s research, the reader is transported into the tumultuous history of the Years of Lead via the story of the political rebels known as the Ravachol Brigade, including Sella, who emerges as a fascinating but elusive figure, seemingly half revolutionary martyr, half fraud.

Marcello’s research takes him to Paris, where Sella’s archive is held, and there he finds himself pulled into the world of Parisian intellectuals and left-wing politics. Drawn in by an idea of Sella he has constructed through the author’s writings, and despite Sacrosanti’s pointed efforts to discourage biographical research, he becomes infatuated with Tea, a beguiling Parisian intellectual, finding parallels between their romance and that of the Ravachol Brigade’s Tito and Emma.

Eventually, he cheats on and leaves his partner. When his father’s sudden illness brings him home, revelations about his parents challenge long-held beliefs, while the suicide of his close friend and fellow student Carlo — perpetually exploited and overlooked by Sacrosanti — forces Marcello to confront uncomfortable truths about his own passivity. The climax comes when Marcello meets Giorgio Palmides, one of Sella’s former comrades, and learns that Sella was never actually present at the attempted assassination for which he was imprisoned. Rather than a principled revolutionary, Sella was a man who chose silence and punishment to atone for the passivity that led to his friends’ deaths, and in this, Marcello comes to see his own inertia

mirrored back at himThe novel ends with Marcello’s letter of withdrawal from his PhD, which simultaneously unmasks Sacrosanti as Barabba, the former comrade who was actually responsible for the attempted assassination but escaped justice. Marcello also shares in the letter his suspicion that he had even been intentionally chosen by Barbabba from the very beginning as a “useful idiot”: capable enough to make Sella’s archive unattractive to serious scholars, but too foolish to understand

what it truly concealed.

AWARDS

WINNER OF THE FLAIANO FICTION PRIZE

WINNER OF THE SATIRA PRIZE 2023

WINNER OF THE MASTERCARD PRIZE FOR LITERATURE 2023

WINNER OF THE BOOK OF THE YEAR FOR FAHRENHEIT RADIO 3

RIGHTS SOLD

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SALES

BESTSELLER AND LONGSELLER OF THE SELLERIO LIST WITH MORE THAN 100,000 COPIES SOLD.

#LITERARY #CAMPUS #FATHERANDSON #POLITICAL #ABSURD #SACRIFICE #INACTION

“The best Italian novel of recent years, which should be at the top of the charts if there were any justice in the world.”

Corriere della Sera

“A vivid and multi-layered novel about the pain of living, compromises, memory - personal and political - and the daily - and often final - contradictions that we ultimately call life.”

La Stampa

Dario Ferrari is an Italian writer and academic. Known for his erudite yet playful prose, he has become one of Italy’s most acclaimed contemporary novelists. Playtime is Over cemented his reputation as a major literary voice, praised across Italy for its stylistic brilliance and intellectual depth. He debuted as a novelist with La quarta versione di Giuda, ‘The Fourth Version of Judas’ (Mondadori, 2020). His third novel L’idiota di famiglia ‘The Family Idiot’ was published by Mondadori in February 2026.

Winner of the 2023 Bagutta Prize, Every Creature is an Island consists of a numbered sequence of small passages, seemingly random fragments that together tell a story, a story that delimits the void of the protagonist’s loneliness as he visits the island where his brother disappeared. With an original form and poetic style, this singular novel is tied together by a compelling narrative, made all the more captivating when it takes an unexpected but moving turn with the arrival of J. who comes to share her own story of loneliness and triumph as a trans refugee.

How can one fill the void of loneliness when it surrounds you on every side, like the sea surrounds a rock? That is what the protagonist of this story asks himself, having moved to a remote island hoping to find answers about the disappearance of his brother F., who may have killed himself on these shores. The truth, however, seems far away, hidden in the silence of the island’s inhabitants; unclear like the pages of the book that his brother left unfinished, and to which he is trying to write an ending; ineffable like the fear that paralyses him and pushes him to increasingly close himself off; unreachable, like the whale-shaped island that he observes from the shore. At least until he meets J., a girl on a red bike, who seems to hide the key to understanding what happened to F. and to dissolving the veneer of silence behind which he finds himself prisoner.

#GRIEF #LONELINESS #FRAGMENTED #POETIC #SILENCE #ISLAND #EXPERIMENTAL

COMPARABLE TO Bluets by Maggie Nelson and The White Book by Han Kang for their explorations of love and grief through unique fragmentary forms that blur the line between poetry and prose.

Andrea De Spirt was born in Venice in 1989 and currently lives in Milan. Every Creature is an Island is his debut novel and was the winner of the 2023 Bagutta Prize, and finalist for the Flaiano Prize and the Mastercard Prize. His second novel is due to publish in early 2026.

“De Spirt maintains, to great effect, a tone of suspense that gives form to one of the beautiful notes that punctuate the novel: “For the Greeks, the search would begin first with waiting.”

Alessandro Berretta, La Lettura Corriere della sera

“A novel about the beauty of individuality that never becomes individualism, a logbook with numbered paragraphs that become the emotional coordinates of those who want to become an adult in an adulterated world. And this is what is missing today in contemporary novels: the courage to be oneself.”

Gian Paolo Serino, il Giornale

First published in 1966 by Feltrinelli

288 pages

Strega Prize Finalist

Other Works by the Author:

Natalia (1930) – Translated into French

Courtyard to Cleopatra (1936) – Translated into Swedish, Dutch, French, & Swiss German

Levantine Ballad (1961, 2024) – Translated into German, Polish, English, & Romanian

Wind on the Sand (1972, 2023)

The Four Weiselberger Girls (1976) – Winner of the Strega Prize and translated into

German, Slovak, & French

“It’s this modernity of hers, this knowing how to recognise herself as both strong and fragile in

adversity, contradictory and unresolved but also determined, that makes her relevant and

engaging for readers today.”

—Donatella Di Pietrantonio, Tuttolibri

“Another highlight of this novel, endowed with a refined writing style but without indulging,

is in fact the appeal for, at least looking ahead, a recognition of female dignity in a social

portrait reinvented using its very foundations.”

—Alberto Casadei, La Lettura

Synopsis

The novel is set in post-war Milan, where a large family find a home in a cramped loft, and Camilla, abandoned by her husband, takes charge of the situation as they endure an incredibly severe winter. The season stretches throughout the novel with beautiful but unsettling descriptions that sit like the heavy snow weighing down the loft’s dilapidated roofs.

In these harsh but intimate conditions, the characters co-exist and persevere, strained by desires for the future and scars from the past. The narrative seamlessly flows between the characters’ thoughts, placing us inside these intimate quarters and the struggle that unites and divides them. By the time spring comes, an unthinkable tragedy will have occurred, and as the season of rebirth begins, much will have irrevocably changed.

Author, journalist, and translator, Fausta Cialente was one of the first self-declared feminist Italian writers. Her early work anticipated modern feminism by decades, however, distribution was limited by the Fascist censorship that followed her refusal to cut depictions of a lesbian affair from her first book Natalia (1931). Contributing to the anti-Fascist movement through her journalism from Egypt, Cialente returned home after the war, and after a long silence, she began publishing again in 1961, eventually winning the prestigious Strega Prize in 1976. With her expatriation that can be interpretated as an influence on the statelessness of her work, Cialente remained far from literary circles and wrote only when she had the urge. Perhaps due to these factors and the initial censorship, her critical recognition came late, and consequently, there has been limited international exposure to this exceptional Italian writer. Cialente spent the last period of her life in Pangbourne, England, working mainly on translations into Italian from English, including Turn of the Screw by Henry James, and she remained there until her death in 1994 at the age of 96.

“Valentina Mira didn’t react and didn’t report, and it took more than ten years before she was able to tell her story in a book, X, which is the account of ‘normal’ rape, where knives don’t emerge and punches don’t fly, but deep wounds remain in the body and the soul.”

Gaia Giorgetti, F

Synopsis

In X, Mira brilliantly teases out the contradictions and cyclical patterns that are all too familiar given the widespread sexual violence that still perseveres today. Captured in a story that is consuming, and for many will be eye-opening, but which frustratingly will be a reality for many others. This synthesis of fiction and reality is the remarkable product of Mira’s endeavour to apply mathematical logic to an impossible problem, to locate the X of a treasure that cannot be found, to give meaning to a tragedy that evades definition, and consequently, like the snake that eats its own tail, remains the status quo.

Mira introduces the book, why it is called X, and the events that lead her to write it i.e. the disappearance of her brother, and his decision to side with and believe the fascist friend who raped his sister. From the rape itself to the trauma that follows, the book conveys the brutal yet banal reality and the pain that is amplified by the codes of silence and the behaviour patterns that allow these vicious cycles to continue, eventually drawing even the protagonist into a complicit role. 

The painful trauma of being raped intensifies throughout the book as the protagonist is confronted with paradoxical traps at every turn. From the silence of those who protect the rapist, to the conflict of being scared to tell her hyper-catholic mother, to the period of numbness and apathy that prevents her from sharing with her brother. This struggle is only deepened when G., the rapist, comes to apologise, but only ‘because they were both drunk’. He soon shifts tone and tells her she’d have to prove it, highlighting the typical obstacles rape victims face, and then threatens to ruin her if she reports him. Even hearing a rape reported on the radio, she is reminded of the limited ways rape is portrayed in all media. 

And I think: is G. right? If the newspapers talk about violence only when it is so evident, maybe mine was not violence? He’s right, I am crazy?

The protagonist eventually resorts to self-harm, which will continue for years, although thanks to her mother’s loving response, she does at least find the courage to report the crime. However, despite the police being kind and helpful, later that day she receives a text from the officer who helped her inviting her to dinner.

What makes the book especially compelling is the tragedy of her brother’s betrayal, sharpened by her open letters to him and the bittersweet recollections of their close childhood together, when they found happiness with each other in spite of a father who threatened violence. After seeing her brother with G., she confesses to him what happened and he goes off to confront G. Before he returns, the protagonist recounts tender memories of her brother coming to her defense as children, setting up a sharp contrast as we then learn that her brother returns with G., convinced into believing that he didn’t rape her. 

In the continued letters to her brother, she recounts what she’s done with her life since he’s disappeared. This includes further recurrences of toxicity such as missing out on an internship because she wouldn’t respond to a coordinator’s advances. How even though the coordinator was made to leave, it was all kept silent, and he just moved to another position.

Despite the extreme difficulty of trying to break into journalism and the struggle of working endless temporary jobs, the protagonist eventually gets a job at a newspaper. With a boss who is very friendly and who lets her write about the progressive content she is interested in, she is finally feeling positive. However, the friendliness of her boss gradually turns into unwanted advances. Tortured by the conflict of not wanting to lose the job she worked so hard to get and wanted so much, she makes up excuses and avoids going to work. Ultimately though, after returning, and receiving the direct threat of losing her job, she caves; she has sex with him, becoming complicit in the unbreakable system. However, if society is going to continually violate her, at least this way she can give herself the impression of consent, she can attempt to reverse the violence in her mind and use it to work even - to do good. In a system of contradictions, where nearly every action or choice is rigged, she can at the very least regain autonomy.

Because society rapes you, it's true, over and over again - but it also gives you wine. Poison and antidote from the same hand. And I am no longer the princess in the castle; it is in society that I want to be, without judgment for poisons, which are antidotes, which are poisons. Which are antidotes.

Following this, reflecting on these paradoxes while drinking alone, she grapples with the choice she made alone in a pub and compares herself to her father drinking away his troubles. However, she is then inspired to take a different path to her father - to direct her anger in the face of fear upwards rather than downwards. She then leaves the pub, goes to G.,’s address and with red spray paint, writes ‘RAPIST’ on the front of the house. This then becomes the first small step towards liberation, ultimately leading to her finding the strength to leave her job, to start again with the help of friends who become family. Replacing the brother and friend who betrayed her, who she knows now she can’t negate, but equally, she can accept what happened and move on.

Because the point is this. I, at most, can reveal the presence of the unknown, of the X… I can tell you what rape is… I can tell you why we don’t report it… I can tell you that there are no rotten apples, that the whole orchard is rotten…

But now, brother, it’s up to you. It’s up to all of you. If you guys will want it, if you will have the courage it takes to break a conspiratorial (and, yes, gratuitously violent) silence.

Otherwise, we will do it without you.

Valentina Mira has a degree in Law. She worked as a rider, in a call center and as a waitress while writing for various newspapers and websites, including manifesto and Corriere della Sera. Between 2017 and 2018 she curated the culture page of Romanista. X is her first book. 

Valentina Maini was born in Bologna in 1987. She completed her PhD in Comparative Literature between Bologna and Paris and has published short stories in retabloid, TerraNullius, Atti Impuri, Horizonte, and other magazines. Some of her articles have appeared in Poetiche, La Deleuziana, and Classiques Garnier. With her collection of poetry, Casa Rotta (2016), she won the Anna Osti literary prize. She translates from French and from English into Italian.

Synopsis

It’s 2007 and we’re in Bilbao, worn out by the final blows of Basque terrorism. Gorane and Jokin are twenty-five year old twins and children of ETA militants. Raised without rules, they take opposing and complementary directions: compliant and passive to everything, Jokin, a heroin-addict drummer, seems to follow in his parents’ footsteps, while Gorane, ambiguous and introverted, pulls away seeking refuge in an abstract world. When Jokin runs away and their parents become involved in a tragic event, Gorane finds herself prey to strange hallucinations of her parents. Meanwhile in Paris, Jokin struggles with his attraction to the mysterious Germana, yet, despite the distance, the twins’ lives seem destined to never separate and it will be a French writer’s novel that reconnects them.

The Melee is a polyphonic work; a world that connects reality to our most recondite dreams, a world where the only driving force seems to be blind violence. Can freedom reveal itself to be an instrument of torture, and can empathy that resists absolutism prevail in the face of trauma? Valentina Maini responds in the pages of this provocative debut and its web of stories connecting drug dealers, smugglers, psychiatrists, writers, cleaners and fortune tellers - and she does it with the conviction of Roberto Bolaño and Mathias Énard: looking chaos directly in the eye.

First place in the L’Indiscreto Quality Rankings - Classifica di Qualità - L'Indiscreto

Shortlisted for the Severino Cesari Debut Award 2020

Shortlisted for the Fondazione Mondadori Debut Award 2020

Chosen by Kobo in Their 50 Books to Defy and Survive the Year 2020 - View List Here

“What is great European literature today? The Melee by Valentina Maini has the range and complexity to fit the bill and the ambition to be part of it.”

Veronica Raimo (The Girl at the Door)

 “There are writers who, more than make their debut, burst onto the scene. By writing novels that play havoc with all the rules. Valentina Maini is one of them.”

Andrea Bajani (If You Kept a Record of Sins; Every Promise)

“Redolent of Clarice Lispector and Roberto Bolano, a haunted, captivating, poetic novel that tells the story of two children of ETA and their quest for life and the future under the tight rein of a true artist and her unique, visionary freedom of language.”

Marta Barone (Città sommersa)

“In The Melee, Valentina Maini unfurls a notable variety of textual typologies – reports, statements, recordings, a novel within the novel – showing that it is still possible to tell stories in an impressive, original manner.”

Wu Ming 2 (Q; Manituana; 54)

 “(An) important, composite, well-structured work with the pace of a classical 20th-century novel (...) an unexpected surprise if you consider that the author, already a great writer, was only born in 1987.”

Valeria Parrella, Grazia

“This rough, explosive, marvellous novel came out at the end of February. Impossible as it may seem given the structure and the quality of the writing, it marks the author’s debut.”

Francesco Targhetta (Perciò veniamo bene nele fotografie; Le vite potenziali)

“La mischia (The Melee) by Valentina Maini is what one might define as a dazzling debut. This in fact ishe first novel by a young author who, in 2016, published a poetry collection (Casa rotta - Broken Home - Arcipelago Itaca) and followed it up with short stories in a number of magazines. As a novel it’s both ambitious and powerful: it’s rare in contemporary Italian literature to read a book of such narrative and poetic complexity written in such a distinctive andfounder assured style, all the more so if it’s by a writer making her debut in the genre.”

Marco Mongelli (founder of 404: file not found),La Balena Bianca

“Compelling and enigmatic.”

Corriere della Sera, La Lettura

“The Meleeis a moving book [...] a hypnotic novel that has the reader constantly opening their eyes wide with surprise at such an intense, convincing debut.”

Silvia Castellani, Satisfiction

“(...) a veritable contemporary epic as Roberto Bolaño might have conceived it, animated by a style at once shamanic and sartorial, capable of returning heterogeneity to unity.”

Minima et Moralia

“A debut that stands out for its lack of uncertainties and the glittering polyphony on which it’s based.”

Il Giornale di Sicilia

“Though The Meleebelongs to the category of novels that chronicle the life of a family, it is given a peculiarity of its own by the strength of the characters (...) explored with a reflective maturity that, applied to this story in particular, draws out the existential dynamics – small shared truths – that are common to the majority of people.”

Il manifesto, Alias

“Very tight writing, almost furious storytelling.”

Corriere della Sera, Io Donna

“Maini’s powerful, sophisticated debut novel reveals a mature, mindful command of language and storytelling.”

Mangialibri.it

“Apparently ‘out of control’ but actually very controlled indeed in its labyrinthine, sophisticated structure.”

Avvenire

“Can liberty – a fragile and illusory conquest of our time – prove to be an instrument of torture that conceals prisons that we hadn’t predicted? Valentina Maini answers the question through the pages of this amazing debut novel (...) and does so with the same decision as Roberto Bolaño and Mathias Énard: by looking chaos straight in the eye.”

Altritaliani.net

“[Valentina Maini] demonstrates enviable maturity (...) a debut with a bang.”

Il Piccolo di Trieste

“Not for a moment did I think I was reading an author’s first novel.”

CriticaLetteraria.org

“(...) brilliant, weighty writing (...) an Italian novel that crosses national borders to become international, in setting and in style.”

Sulromanzo.it