After the dazzling debut of Uvaspina, Monica Acito confirms herself as a singular voice, capable of shaping characters, places, and emotions on the page with an imaginative, vividly colored, life-filled prose.

Marianeve has hair as white as a wild rabbit’s fur, yet, she has never seen snow, despite bearing it in her name, because she was born in the heart of the Cilento, a land of cliffs plunging into the sea. Marianeve is the only, beloved daughter of Sarchiapone, who breaks his back from dawn to dusk in the village grocery store for her sake, unaware of the shame his daughter feels when she catches sight of him behind the greasy shop window, wearing his stained apron and lighting up with a loving smile the moment he sees her.

Sarchiapone is convinced that Marianeve is destined for great things, and so nothing about her worries or surprises him — not even when she locks herself in the cellar with her friends to play forbidden games that reveal to her, for the first time, the hidden power lodged in the most secret part of her own body: the power to heal others.

For her exceptional destiny to be fulfilled, Marianeve will have to leave Sarchiapone and go to Naples, a city as open and mysterious as an oyster, where another woman from the past will come to meet her: Giulia Di Marco, a seventeenth-century heretical nun who had likewise turned her own body into a scandalous instrument of healing, giving a name to the fire burning within her : carnal charity.

Carnal Charity is the story of the bond between a father and a daughter, stronger than any sin and any silence; it is the coming-of-age novel of a provincial girl who becomes a woman in a grand and unsettling city; it is a narrative alembic in which past and present, faith and magic, flesh and spirit blend to give life to an extraordinary love story.