“An almanac of feelings in the blinding light of Rome” – La Lettura – Corriere della Sera (Cristina Taglietti)

“A rough and profound, very calibrated prose.” – Tuttolibri – La Stampa (Omar di Monopoli)

“A comedy all’Italiana, but more ferocious.” Robinson la Repubblica (Filippo La Porta)

“Ricci keeps digging, with bare hands and with iconoclastic fury, in the land of relationships. ” – Il Fatto Quotidiano (Crocifisso Dentello)

“The summer atmospheres are striking, admirably described through the whirlwind of feelings”. – La Gazzetta del Mezzogiorno (Nicolò Carnimeo)

“It’s a novel capable of investigating in depth love obsessions in all its forms, written with lucid look able to explore interpersonal and relationships inside the couple, always bringing doubts to surface, forcing the reader to wonder what can be really called love.” – Satisfiction (Silvia Castellani)

“Luca Ricci talks about feelings as only he can do, in these pages love becomes obsession and he shows that he really understands relationships.” – Il Foglio

“Summers flows tragicomic and dramatic, behind a story that condenses happiness and disillusion.” – Il Mattino

“It’s difficult to find authentic writers willing to build its recognizability not through a brand but through a project based on form and literally expressiveness and Luca Ricci is one of them.” – Il Sole24Ore

“A novel that amuses, making us reflect, even in the cruelty of language and images. Ricci represents the range of contradictory feelings, their vulnerability, along with the need to chase those contradictions because we need them as oxygen to live with.” – La Sicilia

One August night, a man notices a girl sitting at a restaurant table in a resort town near Cape Circeo, the sea closest to Rome. He has been married for many years, to Ester, yet this chance encounter leaves its mark. An incredible story begins between the two, played out under the age-old sign of cruelty, anticipated from one summer to the next, like a standing appointment. Through these two unforgettable protagonists, Luca Ricci portrays the summer, with brilliant “snapshots” that span fifteen years, recounting the same months of the holidays from year to year. The novel is perfectly structured, calibrated to the millimetre.

In Gli estivi Luca Ricci, dazzles the reader with a bright summer light that leaves no room for shadows, carries us to the limits of a story of love and obsession, and then, at the very brink, brings us back to reality. The protagonist views marriage with such cruel lucidity that, paradoxically, it only strengthens and keeps his marriage alive: “There was nothing that made me and Ester more euphoric than talking about marital attrition. It was the only thing that still managed to make us accomplices: commenting on how much couples went to rack and ruin over the years. Talking about that we were able to share something in an authentic way again. After all, marriage had cheated us both.”

Continuing the themes of his previous novel Gli autunnali: marriage, couples, desire, love, Luca Ricci makes a very contemporary and very original interpretation of seriality in a literary polyptych that constitutes his “Magnum Opus”.