Giordano, Paolo

As he did in his Premio Strega–winning debut, The Solitude of Prime Numbers, Giordano deftly mines the vast, mysterious territory of childhood, illuminating how our first relationships and loves inform the adults we become. A big, delicious mash-up of a novel blending the vividly drawn friendships of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan stories with the urgency of Richard Powers’s acts of ecoterrorism in The Overstory. [See Prepub Alert, 1/15/20.]

Concise explanations of the science and statistics are balanced with poignant reflections on human nature and the way forward in this important, timely work.

Despite the tragic events, this is a very entertaining novel, with the characters' innate and passionate sense of the absurdity of their situation, and of life itself, evident in every scene. The fast-paced, present-tense narrative seems to have been translated accurately to capture the nuances of emotion and drama conveyed by the highly intelligent and perceptive Giordano (The Solitude of Prime Numbers). [See Prepub Alert, 4/27/14; for another take on the Italian experience in Afghanistan, see also Melania G. Mazzucco's Limbo, p. 95.]

Just as a prime number is divisible only by one and itself, so, too, are Mattia and Alice both "primes": social misfits unable to fit others into their lives...