Ostia, a summer in the 1990s. Kamil and Beatrice, sixteen and seventeen years old, return to their mother in Italy after spending a year with their father in
Poland. Kamil has missed Rome, and in particular his friends and his mother, Viola. She is an unstable, restless woman, who, a few months earlier, attempted suicide. Beatrice has missed nothing about Italy. But everything is about to change. Kamil takes refuge in the pack, forced to conceal his vulnerability. Beatrice falls in love for the first time, blinded by her passion for Nico who feels constricted by the fate he has been stranded with – drugs, theft, violence – and wants to be a better person for Beatrice’s sake. Arriving in Italy as a political refugee, spending your childhood in an asylum seekers’s camp, being the foreigner. Things Spiechowicz experienced, but these are only starting points in her novel. In a measured style, she widens her scope to the search for oneself and to desire, which explode in adolescence.
Winner of the Clara Sereni 2023 award for unpublished novels.
“A strikingly intense debut where language is as central as the sand attached to the bodies of its protagonists”. Ginevra Lamberti
“Those ages or places or occasions in life when you feel such deep hatred for yourself that the only possibility is to be reborn”. Valeria Parrella
Paulina Spiechowicz was born in Kraków in 1983.
After she moved to Italy as a child, then studied publishing and journalism in Rome, where she lives. Her short stories have been published in 'Nazione Indiana', 'Satisfiction' and 'Patria letteratura'. She has also written stage plays, which have been performed in Paris, as well as poetry: Studi sulla notte (Ensemble 2012).
Pub date: January 2025
Length: pp. 192
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