The City of the Living
ABOUT
THE BOOK
In March 2016, in an apartment on the outskirts of Rome, two “ordinary” young men brutally tortured and murdered twenty-two-year-old Luca Varani. News of the crime sent shockwaves across Rome. What motivated such extreme violence? Were the killers evil or in the grip of societal evils? Did they know what they were doing, or were they possessed? And if the latter, by what? Lagioia leads us through a maze of betrayed expectations, sexual confusion, economic grievance and identity crises to locate the breaking point after which anything is possible. Sharp, hypnotic, devastating, The City of The Living is not just the story of a crime, but of human nature itself.
ABOUT
THE TRANSLATOR Ann
Goldstein
Ann Goldstein has translated into English all of Elena Ferrante’s books, including the New York Times bestsellers The Lying Life of Adults and The Story of the Lost Child, which was also shortlisted for the International Booker Prize. She has been honored with a Guggenheim Fellowship and is the recipient of the PEN Renato Poggioli Translation Award. She lives in New York.
Ann Goldstein has translated into English all of Elena Ferrante’s books, including the New York Times bestsellers The Lying Life of Adults and The Story of the Lost Child, which was also shortlisted for the International Booker Prize. She has been honored with a Guggenheim Fellowship and is the recipient of the PEN Renato Poggioli Translation Award. She lives in New York.
NOMINATING LIBRARY COMMENTS
A brutal news story becomes for Lagioia the opportunity for a descent into the underworld of the soul of a city, Roma, and an era, ours, as well as into the depths of the author himself. Documentation and sensitivity are intertwined on the model of Capote, Carrère and many other who were able to question evil with the tools of language and literature.