• 2 Seas represents: Dutch, World English, Nordic and French Rights.
• Rights sold: Germany (Heyne, at auction)

FICTION

Love can always find a way back into our hearts; all we have to do is know where to look.

It’s Tuesday evening and the cobblestones are glowing red in the sunset along the banks of the Arno in Florence. Florinda, known as Flò, is walking along beside the parapets but neither the city’s beauty nor the lights sparkling on the river waters can bring the light back into her sad eyes. Flò has been divorced for a year and a half ago now but it feels like yesterday.

She’s always desperately unhappy and can’t seem to shake it off. The aperitifs with her best friends in the Spritztime Bar across the Arno are in vain, in vain the long looks from Giovanni, the charming barman who prepares so many, too many, Negronis, and even her affectionate mongrel, Osso, who tries to drag her on long walks across the sands at Forte dei Marmi. Flò is devastated and that’s how she wants to remain.

One day a woman comes into the sophisticated boutique in the centre of Florence, where she works: in her eyes is the same desperation as Flò’s, but in her gestures the determination to find a way out. In her hand is a card with a ‘phone number on it. It’s the number of the love coach who has set up the group Innamorate anonime (Lovesick Anonymous), to save people from their emotional dependence. Now the doctor has a new challenge: to help Flò understand that love can always find a way back into our hearts; all we have to do is know where to look.

Following the enormous success of C’è chi dice di volerti bene (There Are Those Who Say They Love You), which won the hearts of both booksellers and the general public, Sara Gazzini gives us a new, unmissable novel to find out, perhaps, the truth about love and its disasters. Because happiness takes courage and recognizing our desires and holding fast to them really can help us take flight.

Sara Gazzini, born in Florence in 1976. In 2015 she created the Facebook page La Gazza (The Magpie) which gained hundreds of thousands of fans in a short space of time. She works in a bank but is also a well-known voice on Rai Radio2 and RDF. Two children, a dog, a cat and an ex-husband. Ironic, impulsive, irreverend. A ferocious, infinite, gut passion for writing. Online, anywhere. Sometimes in real life, too.