Questo libro non esiste, by Marilù Oliva, published by Elliot, has proved to be the novel that won the most votes online from our readers, out of all the titles in the running for the 2016 Giorgio Scerbanenco Award.
The Festival has thus decided to honor the novel with the 2016 Noir in Festival Readers’ Choice Award.
Mathias is an aspiring writer who carelessly mislays the manuscript that could have represented his big break into print. Determined to get it back, he starts making the rounds of the critics and publishers to whom he had sent the manuscript, but a murder not only gets in the way: it implicates him directly. Long-buried neuroses resurface, like an obsession with time or the recollection of Mathias’ hypercritical paternal grandfather, who had subjected him to a harsh upbringing and frustrated his childhood ambition of being an astrophysicist. This taciturn, authoritarian father figure, in fact, had devoted the last years of his life to building a time machine, and Mathias had inherited his love for the sky and the stars. Over the years, Mathias’ astronomical bent had served him well as an invaluable tool for classifying and deciphering the human soul: every friendship or relation and even love interest could be compared to a constellation or an element of the cosmos. Perhaps by scanning the starry sky, the protagonist of this original novel will uncover a few clues to solve the crime and, even more importantly, find his way on this earth and finally give his life meaning.
