The book
A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF FALL 2021
Following the international success of Ties and the National Book Award-shortlisted Trick, Domenico Starnone gives readers another searing portrait of human relationships and human folly.
Pietro and Teresa’s love affair is tempestuous and passionate. After yet another terrible argument, she gets an idea: they should tell each other something they’ve never told another person, something they’re too ashamed to tell anyone. They will hear the other’s confessions without judgment and with love in their hearts. In this way, Teresa thinks, they will remain united forever, more intimately connected than ever.
A few days after sharing their shameful secrets, they break up. Not long after, Pietro meets Nadia, falls in love, and proposes. But the shadow of the secret he confessed to Teresa haunts him, and Teresa herself periodically reappears, standing at the crossroads, it seems, of every major moment in his life. Or is it he who seeks her out?
Starnone is a master storyteller and a novelist of the highest order. His gaze is trained unwaveringly on the fault lines in our public personas and the complexities of our private selves. Trust asks how much we are willing to bend to show the world our best side, knowing full well that when we are at our most vulnerable we are also at our most dangerous.
The author
Domenico Starnone
Domenico Starnone is considered by many to be Italy’s greatest living author. He is the author of fifteen best-selling works of fiction, including: Ties, a New York Times Editors’ Pick and Notable Book of the Year, and a Sunday Times and Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year; Trick, a Finalist for the 2018 National Book Award and the 2019 PEN Translation Prize; and, Trust, “a short, sharp novel that cuts like a scalpel to the core of its characters” (LA Times). All three of these novels were translated by Pulitzer Prize-winner, Jhumpa Lahiri.
Starnone’s Strega Prize-winning novel, The House on Via Gemito (Europa, 2023), translated by Oonagh Stransky, was named a Washington Post and Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year and a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and was long-listed for the 2024 International Booker Prize. In 2024, again in Stransky’s translation, Europa released The Mortal and Immortal Life of the Girl from Milan, which the New Yorker described as “wonderfully off-kilter.” His short stories have appeared in the Paris Review, the New Yorker, and the Georgia Review. His most recent novel is The Old Man by the Sea. Starnone is the recipient of many of Italy’s major literary prizes, including: the Strega prize, the Napoli prize, and the Campiello prize.
Press
- Nov 10 2021
“Proves one of the novel’s best gambits.”
— Washington Post - Nov 9 2021
“The Terrible Powers of Self-Deception.”
— Los Angeles Review of Books - Nov 9 2021
“A sweeping examination of aging, love, and success.”
— Booklist - Nov 8 2021
“...cuts like a scalpel to the core of its characters.”
— Los Angeles Times - Nov 6 2021
“The book that taught me what translation was.”
— The New Yorker - Nov 5 2021
“Electrifying.”
— Financial Times