COME D'ARIA (Like Air)

COME D'ARIA (Like Air)
by Ada D'Adamo

Elliott - Italy, January 2023, 144 pages

Rights sold: Brazil/Todavia, Croatia/Naklada Ljevak, France/Grasset, Germany/Eisele Verlag, Greece/Psichogios, The Netherlands/De Arbeiderspers, Spain/Lumen

 
Prize -----------------------------------------------------------------
-FLAIANO PRIZE 2023 (SPECIAL PRIZE FOR FICTION)
-MONDELLO PRIZE 2023
-CAMPIELLO PRIZE 2023 (SPECIAL MENTION)
-STREGA GIOVANI PRIZE 2023

Up coming ----------------------------------------------------------
-1 of 5 Final round  The Massarosa Prize 2023
-General bestseller No.3
-Fiction bestseller No.2
-Up to 140,000 copies in Italy
-On Chart Italian Fiction Best seller List 24 weeks

 
Daria is the daughter, whose fate has been marked since her birth by the lack of a diagnosis.  Ada is the mother, who on the threshold of her fifties, discovers she is ill.  This discovery becomes an opportunity to address her daughter directly and tell her their story. Everything goes through the bodies of Ada and Daria: daily struggles, anger, secrets, but also unexpected joys and moments of infinite tenderness. Words cross time, in a constant intertwining of past and present. A story of extraordinary strength and truth, where every moment is offered to the reader as a gift.

She doesn't see, does she?
No.
But does she speak?
No.
Does she walk?
No.
Then she's magic!

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Praises

Come d'aria is a novel that delves into the reader's heart. It took the precise and implacable language of this writer to support such a ferocious sentiment. You enter this book with enormous ease, but you come out of this book changed. There is such an amount of life in its pages that it leaves us breathless.' - Elena Stancanelli, from the Presentation to the STREGA PRIZE

'There are extreme circumstances in which literature serves whoever writes it and whoever reads it [...] a good strategy against pain. But a book about pain is successful when it is also a book full of happiness. And when you read the first page, you understand that Come d'aria is a book that radiates happiness.' -Paolo Di Stefano, Corriere Della Sera

'A book that denies that [does not fall into the] category of repelling book, those books that hurt too much to read because they show how much life always remains - to be created, devised - even when there seems to be no more life.' - Jonathan Bazzi, Domani, author of Fever, shortlisted for Strega Prize