“But what do you need a mediocre love for? The love that is there because it has always been there, the hypocritical love, the love that you feel from afar, that you wait outside the door and it doesn’t come in. It knocks, you open, not one door: you open a hundred and it doesn’t come in, it loves you from where you can’t defend yourself.”

Santa doesn’t settle for feeble feelings: she doesn’t seek security but absolute love. This is the story of an indomitable and complex woman, who pursues her own desires, her own freedom and breaks all rules about femininity, independence, motherhood. She accepts the risk of inhabiting the timeless space of pure desire and passion.

Santa was born in a small village on the seaside in Calabria, in the deep South of Italy, where life is immobile and still rooted in the archaic and absurd traditions of the province and the sound of sea waves.

But Santa has a primordial force in her, a strength that – equally to her fragility – frightens and repels those around her. She grew up trying to punch her way in life with her own determination and attitude, in spite of her mother, in spite of her capricious sister, always preferred by her family.

Santa has only one dream: to be loved and therefore happy. Thus she decides to run away from a place that is holding her down and moves to Piedmont (Northern Italy) with Gianni, her former high school classmate.

In the new town, with her job as wedding hairstyle model and the birth of her son Tommaso, she thinks she is one step from happiness. Even from the outside, her life seems enviable, many women look up to her: modeling for hair products adds to the general perception of Santa’s life as perfect. But the violence from Gianni and the abortion her new partner Mauro forces her to have trigger a chain of events in a toxic relationship that will lead to a preposterous and unpredictable outcome.

With a dizzying, raw and poetic style, through this brilliant literary debut, Rosanna Turone guides us into a world where love is refuge but also poison, and where frailty is more dangerous than force. Turone addresses important themes that ignite public debate with a unique grace and lightness, that is way of gliding over things from above, without the weight of a heavy heart.