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2014 Longlist

Alfa Romeo 1300 and Other Miracles

Translated from the original Italian by Antony Shugaar

ABOUT
THE BOOK

Diego is a forty-something car salesman with a talent for telling half-truths. Fausto sells watches over the phone. Claudio manages (barely) his family-owned neighborhood supermarket. The characteristic common to each of these three men is their abject mediocrity. Yet, mediocrity being the mother of outrageous invention, they embark on a project that would be too ambitious in scope for any single one of them, let alone all three together. They decide to flee the city and to open a rustic holiday farmhouse in the Italian countryside outside Naples. Things would have been challenging enough for these three unlikely entrepreneurs, but when a local mobster arrives and demands they pay him protection money things go from bad to worse. Now their ordinary (if wrongheaded) attempt to run a small business in an area that organized crime syndicates consider their own becomes a quixotic act of defiance.

ABOUT
THE AUTHOR Fabio
Bartolomei

Fabio Bartolomei works in advertising and lives in Rome. Alfa Romeo 1300 and Other Miracles is his first novel.

Fabio Bartolomei works in advertising and lives in Rome. Alfa Romeo 1300 and Other Miracles is his first novel.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

Date published
30/11/2012
Publisher
Europa Editions
Translator
Antony Shugaar
Translation
Translated from the original Italian by Antony Shugaar

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