The House on Via Gemito

LONGLISTED FOR THE INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE 2024

Available in English for the first time, this extraordinary prize-winning novel confirms Domenico Starnone’s reputation as one of Italy’s greatest living writers. Starnone, a finalist for the National Book Award with Trick, and author of the critically acclaimed and bestselling Ties and Trust, goes beyond the slim, succinct novella-length works by which he is known by American readers to create a vast fresco of family, fatherhood, and modern Naples.

Narrated against the background of Naples, which itself becomes a living character in this lush, atmospheric novel, and steeped in the city’s language and imagery, The House on Via Gemito is a masterpiece of contemporary Italian literature.

The modest apartment in Via Gemito smells of paint and white spirit. The living room furniture is pushed up against the wall to create a makeshift studio, and drying canvases must be moved off the beds each night. Federí, the father, a railway clerk, is convinced of possessing great artistic talent. If it weren’t for the family he has to feed, he’d be a world-famous painter. Ambitious and frustrated, genuinely talented but full of arrogance and resentment, his life is marked by bitter disappointment.

It's his first-born who, years later, will sift the lies from the truth to tell the story of a man he spent his whole life trying not to resemble.