Calisi Press, a new publishing house focusing on contemporary creative works by Italian women writers, will publish My Mother is a River by Donatella Di Pietrantonio. The book has been translated by Franca Scurti Simpson and comes out on 4 November 2015.
My Mother is a River is the sensitive and powerful story of the love between a mother and her daughter, a love “gone wrong from the start”. When Esperia exhibits the symptoms of a disease that robs her of her memory and the very sense of her existence, it is time for the daughter to take care of her and help her to rebuild her disintegrating identity. So the daily recounting of the past begins. Day after day we learn about the characters of the extended family, the inhabitants of the small village still without running water or electricity, in a “bright and harsh” Abruzzo, which emerges from the pages like a mythological distant land. And, in the telling, the mother and daughter relationship slowly changes, fluctuating between love and hate, nostalgia and denial.
Donatella Di Pietrantonio is an Italian writer and this is her first novel. It was first published in Italy in 2011, where it won the Tropea and the John Fante literary prizes, and was translated into German in 2013. It has sold over 40,000 copies in Italy.