• 2 Seas represents: Dutch Rights.

UPMARKET FICTION

The love story interweaving present and past (and based on a true story) through the correspondence of two lovers during the Second World War.

Florence: Giacomo and Marta are enthusiast and full of expectations when they leave their home in the southern region of Basilicata to attend university.

They can’t wait to plunge into the vibrant life of the city, to join the intense political debates and to be part of the extravagant student lifestyle. But soon, after a promising start beaming with parties, booze, sit-ins and social centres, Giacomo finds out that Marta is cheating on him.

Devastated and with a shattered heart, Giacomo finds support in Momi, his gay flatmate from Egypt – who loves photography more than he enjoys studying – and his boyfriend Liro. It is Momi who introduces Giacomo to some old correspondence: fifty years before a girl and a boy, Adele and Tino, hugged on street corners in a Florence devastated by the bombs of the Second World War – the same neighbourhood in the city where Giacomo and his friends live. It was wartime, Adele and Tino were fighting the Fascist regime and they were forced to part. In the tender and passionate lines that the two lovers dedicated to each other, Giacomo will discover again the beauty of his twenties and of a love as romantic as the one you can only experience at that age.

The letters take him back to where he started and give him the possibility of a new beginning: Giacomo is ready to love again with the eagerness and the joy of a person who has his whole life ahead.

Praise for Corrado Fortuna’s previous novel, Un giorno sarai un posto bellissimo:

“Blend John Fante, Vitaliano Brancati, Tony Soprano and My Name is Tanino and the result is this book” — Roberto Saviano