The Innocent Days of War

“[A] dreamy, elegiac novel…Fortunato’s real strength is in alternating between focusing in closely on the emotional struggles and longings of his many characters and zooming out to consider the progress of the war in Europe and Africa as a whole.” —Booklist

“These characters all encounter each other in wholly unexpected ways—and ones that have little to do with the political allegiances they’re meant to be upholding. In this, Fortunato highlights how arbitrarily these grand forces intersect with the lived realities of actual people, masterfully capturing the chaos of wartime.” —Asymptote Journal

Praise for Mario Fortunato:

“As I read Fortunato’s writing, I have the impression of being faced with that kind of writer, rare in Italian literature, who, despite starting from a poetic state of mind, nevertheless manages to be a storyteller.” —Alberto Moravia

“Mario Fortunato is a natural storyteller.” —Doris Lessing

Mario Fortunato was born in Cirò, Calabria, Italy. For three decades he worked as a literary critic for the Italian current affairs magazine L’Espresso. More recently he has worked as a columnist for the German daily paper Süddeutsche Zeitung. He has also served as director of the Italian Cultural Institute in London. In addition to writing novels such as South (Other Press, 2023), a New York Times Best Historical Fiction Book of the Year, he has translated into Italian works by Evelyn Waugh, Virginia Woolf, and Henry James.

Julia MacGibbon has translated works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, including Marta Barone’s Sunken City. She lives near Rome.

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