It all begins with a safety pin that catches on a button, and rips. She, the pin, is named Kyara: sixteen years old, boots on, hair short and bleached, determined stride as she goes to the clandestine meeting of the feminist poetry circle. The button she gets caught in is Alex, who cares so much about the button-down shirt up to the neck because dressing like a mod and playing in a band, when you’re seventeen in Pordenone and it’s 1981, is the way not to let yourself suffocate. She pursues poetry, he pursues the dream of music, and so they meet. In fact, they collide. So hard that, in the collision, Alex’s shirt rips. And in that instant, a feeling that neither of them has ever felt unites them and, in doing this, tears them apart. For Alex and Kyara, it is a vertigo, the beginning of a great love and a journey to discover the joys of the body and the abysses of the soul, because this great all-consuming desire is also a break from the rules of the pack and of a deaf, macho and violent province. With a soundtrack that gives rhythm to friendships and betrayals, plots and baseness, parents unable to understand and kids who run away from home, raids in the darkest parts of the day and the brightest parts of the night, Alex and Kyara’s story draws a parable that, as it touches its highest point, also touches its lowest: the place where love and death come together.
Umberto Sebastiano has covered Culture and Entertainment for various newspapers and magazines. He has written tv and radio programs for Rai and Mediaset, writes for the theatre and published two children’s books.
Pub date: 12 May 2022
Length: 288pp
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