Sometimes you go back home for love; other times, because you have to. There are cases of people’s roots calling them back, or those roots turn into the only refuge there is. Especially if it’s 1940, Italy is at war, and your family’s roots happen to be Jewish. So begins a new chapter for Inspector Ricciardi, juggling the funk he is in, the fears he has, and the innocent, dreamy gaze of his daughter. Fortino, the town where he was born, might be the perfect place to keep safe and find some peace, together with his daughter and his in-laws, but it will be right on his property that the past will come knocking and he’ll have to come to terms with it. The inspector’s personal history is now entwined with history with a capital ‘h’, in a novel that paints a broad canvas, packed with memories, courage, hope, and not least, resistance. In 2007 Maurizio De Giovanni attracted the attention of Italy’s literary scene after winning an award, thanks to a novel set in Naples in the 1930s, featuring a police commissioner, Luigi Alfredo Ricciardi: Il senso del dolore (I Will Have Vengeance). Thus began his highly popular series that counts fifteen novels to date, with the latest, Volver, plus several stories in the short story collections Giochi criminali (Einaudi, 2014), L’omicidio Carosino. Le prime indagini del commissario Ricciardi (Centoautori, 2017), and L’ultimo passo di tango (Rizzoli, 2017). The equally popular TV series based on the Ricciardi novels aired on Raiuno for two seasons. In 2012, De Giovanni won the Scerbanenco Award for The Crocodile (Mondadori), which introduced Inspector Lojacono, a protagonist of another hit book series as well, set in contemporary Naples: The Bastards of Pizzofalcone. This last added a new chapter in 2024: Pioggia per i bastardi di Pizzofalcone, and it also became a popular TV series starring Alessandro Gassmann and Carolina Crescentini. With a more recent novel, Sara al tramonto, De Giovanni created another character, a former secret service agent, now retired, with the gift of invisibility and a talent for stealing people’s secrets. By 2023, this series was now six titles strong, with Sorelle. Una storia di Sara, and will soon get the Netflix treatment and turn into a series starring Teresa Saponangelo and Claudia Gerini. And lately the author has enriched his Mina Settembre series with the fourth and fifth installment, Troppo freddo per Settembre and Una sirena a Settembre, both published by Einaudi, while the first three novels came out with Sellerio. There are myriad comics and graphic novels based on the author’s works. Since 2017, Sergio Bonelli Editore has published ten comic books based on the Inspector Ricciardi novels and five annual magazines with unpublished stories. The same publisher has brought out four comics devoted to The Bastards of Pizzofalcone novels, and in October 2024 also published the collection Il segreto di Martina e altre storie.

All Aura Reyes needs now is to stay alive for another ten minutes. And it won’t be easy. There’s one of her against four others, stronger than her, and, cornered in a prison yard, she has never been good at defending herself. Or maybe she can, since Aura has to get her daughters back. And her friends, too. Which is why she has dreamed up a plan that starts in ten minutes. So, no, she has no intention of dying today. A new challenge awaits outside the prison: she’ll have to reckon with the Dorrs, a powerful family with many secrets, and its last heir, Irma, happens to run a mysterious club. Plus, there’s a precious briefcase to get back. What’s inside she doesn’t know, but whatever it is, it’s potentially explosive. An impossible plan. And a never-ending escape, given that getting caught is not an option. Juan Gómez-Jurado is a reporter for La Voz de Galicia and ABC, and a novelist whose works have been translated into forty languages. In 2008, his novel The Traitor’s Emblem (Plaza & Janés) won the prestigious Novela Ciudad de Torrevieja Award, and his 2011 Contract with God (Circulo de lectores) won two awards at the International Latino Book Awards. The trilogy made up of Red Queen, The Black Wolf, and White King was wildly popular, with over three million copies sold, and cemented his reputation as the best-selling Spanish thriller writer ever, as well as one of the best exponents of the genre on the international level. The Prime Video 2024 series Red Queen and Scar are based on Gómez-Jurado’s novels.

The state television studios are shocked by the death of Giovanni, one of the evening news program’s star anchormen, after his last dramatic appearance on air. The news of his passing is so upsetting that everyone prefers to forget about it in a hurry: the executives at the TV channel are relieved to get back to the programming, and the staff plunges back into its normal routine. But something’s just not right about that sudden death, and, years later, a reporter and close friend of Giovanni’s, who had paired up with him on many professional assignments, decides to look through his friend’s papers, locked in an office at Saxa Rubra where no one has ever set foot since that fatal day. Or so it seems. Born in La Spezia, Maurizio Mannoni has been a reporter for the RAI channel Tg3 for years, and the host of Tg3 Linea notte up to 2023. He has been in charge of some of RAI TV’s most popular news programs and investigative reports, including Ultimo minuto, Primo piano, and Un giorno per sempre. Since May 2024, he has been part of Piero Chiambretti’s show Donne sull’orlo di una crisi di nervi, airing on Raitre. Quella notte a Saxa Rubra is Mannoni’s first novel.

The glamorous film world can be a jungle. But Andy Schroeder honed his survival skills as a kid, growing up albino in Ostia in the 1980s, with bullies, thugs, and outright mobsters. Now he’s the respected and admired founder of W, an agency representing famous actors and actresses and fresh young faces alike, such as the splendid Vera Bellini, the complex Berto Martini, and the haughty ageing star Italia Nobile. It’s August on the eve of the Venice Film Festival, glittering and stress-producing in equal measure. Andy and his team know they’ll be fielding expectations, frustrations, and sheer caprice, but they sure don’t expect a series of strange accidents that will involve all W’s star clients, one by one. Worries are growing in the rarefied rooms of the Venetian hotels, while the most dangerous charge of all is being leveled at Andy from different quarters: could he possibly be a jinx? How can this string of accidents be simply a coincidence? The founder and head of the film talent agency DO Agency, Daniele Orazi has handled the careers of Italian and international stars and upcoming talent for over thirty years. In 2005, he founded Officine Artistiche, which brought artists like Daniele Liotti, Filippo Timi, Francesca Inaudi, and Alba Rohrwacher under his wing. In 2016, he made his debut at the Venice Film Festival as a co-producer (La ragazza del mondo by Marco Danieli). In 2017, he saw to the conception, production and artistic direction of the documentary DIVA! directed by Francesco Patierno, based on the book Quanti sono i domani passati by Valentina Cortese. Ostiawood marks Orazi’s debut as a novelist.

Florian Kaufman, an engineer, dreams of setting up an ethical enterprise in Brazil. Being Swiss, he assumes that his logical mind will help him in this endeavor, but he soon finds himself up against the hostility of those who classify him as a “gringo”, a foreigner, plus inept police officers and a crime ring ready and willing to pay him off, or worse. Page after page, Kaufman’s initial faith in justice vacillates as he discovers a shadow reality. Especially when he finds himself catapulted into a case of murder, for which he’s been framed, and then into an ethical dilemma that challenges his morality and his dreams. Carlo Calabrò was born in Palermo and studied bio-engineering in Milan and Paris. His career as a consultant, banker, and entrepreneur took him to countries all around the world to live, and he spent eleven years in Brazil. Thanks to this experience, in 2011 he published, together with his father, Antonio, the book Bandeirantes. Il Brasile alla conquista dell'economia mondiale (Laterza). He next moved to New York, became a screenwriter, and won an award at the Vortex Sci-Fi, Fantasy and Horror Film Festival. In 2024, his first novel, Meccanica di un addio, was published by Marsilio and shortlisted for the Giorgio Scerbanenco Award at this year’s Noir in Festival.

Set in the year 1836, the 63rd novel by the great American writer Joyce Carol Oates is inspired by real events that took place in an insane asylum for women, where Doctor Silas Aloysius Weir has taken refuge after being accused of a lethal experiment on a newborn girl. At the asylum, the decidedly creepy physician carries out cruel procedures on women who are vulnerable and overlooked by the health system. They become guinea pigs for experiments that defy every ethical principle, and in an era when mental health attracted very little empathy. Although his actions are deeply reprehensible, Doctor Weir is glorified by the society of the day as a brilliant avant-garde surgeon and is even dubbed “the father of gyno-psychiatry”. A central element of the novel is represented by the character of Brigit Kinealy, a young Irish maid who turns into the main target of Doctor Weir’s experiments. Brigit is the only person who is able to stand up to the physician’s authoritarian control, and she brings to the novel a touch of sentiment in such a grim setting, since she eventually becomes the doctor’s assistant, and Weir, obsessed with her unearthly beauty, comes to believe there is a special, if tacit, communion between the two of them. Brigit’s character proves that humankind can resist, even in the most desperate of circumstances, thanks to hope, a light in a world in which madness and terror prevail. Butcher has the feverish energy, narrative drive, and descriptive power of most of Oates’ previous novels. Ultimately, however, this novel has broader social implications that one might expect, and becomes a perceptive and empathetic reflection on women’s rights, the misdeeds of the patriarchy, and the servanthood of the poor and outcast. As she always does, Oates succeeds in creating a world that is different from ours yet also familiar, making it impossible for readers to ignore her observations on the twisted nature of human beings and the violence often associated with it. Joyce Carol Oates was born in Lockport, New York. After living in both the United States and Canada, since 1978 she has resided in New Jersey. Year after year, she has been a frontrunner for the Nobel Prize, and several times a finalist for the Pulitzer, for her over seven-hundred literary works, in the form of novels, short stories, memoirs, plays, young adult literature, essays and poetry. Her oeuvre has received important honors, such as the National Medal of Humanities, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Book Award, and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction. Oates taught creative writing at Princeton University from 1978 to 2014 and is currently a professor at UC Berkeley, where she teaches short fiction. She has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978. Since 1963, Oates has written over a hundred novels and other books, trying her hand at a variety of genres and honing her

Inspector Carlo De Vincenzi, the cult police detective created by Augusto De Angelis during the fascist era, is the protagonist of the fifth novel in a series through which Crovi has been paying homage to him since 2018. In this latest adventure, the phlegmatic investigator, nicknamed “the poet of crime”, needs to find the truth about a daredevil feat, the disappearance of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre in Paris, and another theft that, twenty years later, mysteriously involved Italy’s Warrior Bard, Gabriele D’Annunzio. The irony being that, for him to crack one of the toughest cases of his career, the cool-headed De Vincenzi will need the help of an icon of speed racing: Tazio Nuvolari. Luca Crovi, an author and journalist who is an expert on noir novels, has always worked with various daily newspapers and magazines. In 2002, his monograph on the genre, Tutti i colori del giallo, was published by Marsilio and turned into the radio program of the same name on Radiodue (running until 2011). Crovi has also written other studies like Noir. Istruzioni per l’uso (Garzanti, 2013) and Storia del giallo italiano (Marsilio, 2020), and anthologies such as L’occhio dell’assassino and (Rizzoli, 2021). He has five novels to his credit: L’ombra del campione (2018), L’ultima canzone del Naviglio (2020), Il Gigante e la Madonnina (2022), Il mistero della torre del parco e altre storie (2022), and La velocità della tartaruga (2024).

The joy of exchanging ideas can lead to some surprising encounters, as Antonio Monda well knows: together with his wife, Jacqueline, he has turned his New York City home into the city’s “only remaining cultural salon” (New York Times), where unique friendships, lasting bonds, and social connections are made. Incontri ravvicinati (Close Encounters) is a collection of portraits of the actors, directors, artists, writers, and singers whose lives have become entwined with the author’s, some ships passing in the night, others for life. Icons of the caliber of Marina Abramović, Wes Anderson, James Ellroy, Lucio Dalla, Jane Fonda, Stephen King, and Susan Sontag turn into real men and women on the page, with their joys and sorrows, their lived lives, their struggles against shyness, or worse. And their irony or artistry, as a response. The introduction was penned by Jonathan Safran Foer. Antonio Monda lives in New York. A writer, an NYU Associate Professor and the Artistic Director of the international literary festival Le Conversazioni, which he co-founded in 2006, with Davide Azzolini, he was also the Artistic Director of the Rome Film Festival from 2015 until 2021. He has taken the director’s chair, as well, on several documentaries as well as his 1990 feature film Dicembre, which premiered at Venice. Since 2003, Monda has written several novels and works of criticism, such as La magnifica illusione (Efebo d'Oro Award for the best book about film); and the novels L’America non esiste (Cortina d'Ampezzo Prize); L'evidenza delle cose non viste (Special Mention at the Giulietta awards); and Io sono il fuoco (Biagio Agnes Award). Over the course of his career, he has curated exhibitions for the Louvre, MoMA, Lincoln Center, and the Guggenheim, and he is a regular contributor to the cultural pages of La Repubblica, La Stampa and RAI. In 2023, he received the Amerigo National Journalism Prize for his magazine articles.