A hard-edged novel that looks ambition straight in the eye and dissects it without flinching. The thirst for power knows no limits, and Annalisa De Simone renders it with virtuosity. Letizia moves to Rome for university – and then for work – hungry for access to the corridors of power. Her ailing father, widowed for many years, entrusts her to a celebrated fellow townsman, the trade-union leader Tonino Giuliante. At first he is only her mentor, until something unexpected – and compromising – happens between them. Their entanglement lasts nearly thirty years, charting Giuliante’s decline in parallel with Letizia’s ruthless ascent. From 1992 to the present day, the novel follows almost three decades of Letizia’s life, from her childhood in Abruzzo to her years in Rome. It lays bare her remorseless ambition, her hunger for redemption, and her longing for power. But what underlies these unbridled yearnings? Is power a form of defence against loneliness and the fear of abandonment? What remains when the goal is reached and we realise that life was elsewhere? “We, all of us, are destined to return to the places and people we have betrayed.”
A true story intertwined with a fictional one, set in the shadow of Abruzzo’s majestic mountains. An ambitious woman who walks through life inexorably alone Il Riformista
Annalisa De Simone captures the grey area of a singular, complex, deeply human woman with a clear and refined style. Mario Desiati
Pub date: October 2025
Length: pp. 224
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