From Camilleri to Le Clézio, what’s new in bookstores this week

Arrives on shelves with Mondadori ‘Saving lives’ by Luca Cari, the director of the National Fire Brigade who has been managing emergency communications in the field in Italy and abroad since 2006. At 3.36am on 24 August 2016, central Italy was hit by a tremendous earthquake measuring 6.0 on the Richter scale, which went down in history as the Amatrice earthquake. Some towns are obliterated in an instant and the sudden collapse of buildings swallows up hundreds of people. Others are balancing on the attics, some are submerged in desperation, all are clinging to the hope of rescue which, in Italy, is called firefighters. Their arrival has a single purpose: to save lives. When the whip of any calamity strikes, the firefighters set out aboard their equipped fire engines, climb over obstacles, dig, saw, pull, move, lift, lower and fight until they find the person behind the voice calling for help. They save lives, often putting their own at risk.

In this book, the same protagonists in uniform describe ten rescue operations carried out in the very first hours of the earthquake. They are all true stories, very engaging and always dramatic regardless of the individual endings, which are always different. The meritorious novelty of Saving Lives is giving voice to the emotions and lucid courage of many servants of the State who carry out heroic actions and then return to the anonymity of their offices. Even if when they go out with sirens blaring towards the emergency site they have only one thing in mind: saving lives.

Sellerio sends to the bookstore ‘The investigations of Commissioner Collura’ by Andrea Camilleri. “Eight sharp and lightning-fast investigations, eight stories of pleasant liveliness. This is what Camilleri’s pocket-sized volume dedicated to Inspector Cecè Collura (friend and disciple of Salvo Montalbano) and his collaborative deputy from Trieste offers readers – says the literary critic Salvatore Silvano Nigro. the relaxing foresight of eight texts to be published during the summer of 1998. With ease, Camilleri made of constraint an art form: a measured, relaxed, enjoyable and ultimately lively story. Cecè Collura was actually a police commissioner in convalescence. A bullet had hit him in the liver during a fight with some bank robbers cruise, with the improvised role of ship’s purser, and therefore of investigator. The role was not congenial to him, but on land.

“A slip of the tongue – continues Nigro – was revealing. Cecè had allowed himself a fiction. He experienced the cruise ship as if it were the perimeter of a village: “a small temporary and moving town”. He made a slip of the tongue. He called the almost two thousand passengers on the ship ‘villagers’. At the end of each investigation he will ask himself ‘if that cruise was real or virtual’. Fictitious. The entire narrative machine of the stories (starting from the consoling and honest self-fiction of the commissioner) will proceed between various fictions and falsifications of events. The first person to enter the scene is an occult, false character: behind the mask was hidden the nostalgic Prime Minister who wanted to relive the years in which he performed as a singer on cruise ships. The astonishing series concludes with a wonderful company of virtual characters immersed in a ‘two November atmosphere’: a lady, with a jealous husband but cheerfully attracted by the ‘cervical miniskirts’ of his secretaries, who was nicknamed ‘inconsolable widow’ due to her perpetual sadness; and a philosopher, soul mate of the ‘inconsolable’, who could pass for a ‘condemned to death’ close to execution”.

‘Darwin’s feathers’, the essay by marine biologist Ferdinando Boero in the bookshop with Laterza, it is an invitation to rethink the way we look at the world. We don’t need a theory of everything. We need to go back and see everything. The living is historicity, variability, uniqueness: this is why nothing is more complex than life sciences. In his masterpiece ‘The Origin of Species’, Charles Darwin, to underline the difference between physics and the life sciences, proposes a surprising image: “Throw a handful of feathers into the air, and they must all fall to the ground according to defined laws. But how simple is this problem when compared with the action and reaction of the innumerable plants and animals which have determined, over the centuries, the proportional numbers and types of trees which now grow on those old Indian ruins!”.

This book begins and is inspired by this sentence, to tell nature as a story: the story of millions of species which, through relationships, conflicts and cooperation, have built the planet’s ecosystems. What we must be clear about is that the living state of matter is the most complex in the known universe and, therefore, studying it is the most daring challenge there is, both for scientists and for those who – even if not dedicating themselves to science – have a minimum of curiosity to understand what is happening around them.

Therefore, natural history is history: it describes what has happened and is happening and tries to understand the causes that determined it. We can no more ask it to be predictive than we can ask historians to predict the history of the future. Economists do it and, invariably, they fail. This means that life sciences cannot be reduced to mathematical formulas, deductive models, nor can they be predictive like physics, for example. When dealing with the complexity of life, other approaches are needed. Intertwining science, natural history and cultural reflection, Boero has written a great book of natural history that brings nature back to the center of our culture. Which comes from observing animals and plants, not building models. Our intelligence was born outside the laboratories: that is where we must return to understand the world we inhabit.

In 1948, an eight-year-old boy leaves post-war Europe to join, in Nigeria, a father he never really knew. That journey to Africa is not just a geographical move: it is the entrance into an absolute, primordial world, where light burns, rain explodes, nature pulsates with a force that overwhelms and liberates. Many years later, the Nobel Prize for literature J.M.G. Le Clézio in the book ‘The African’ on the shelves with La Nave di Teseo, he returns in memory to that founding experience. Through the clear and restless gaze of the child he once was, he reconstructs the encounter with an immense and living land, but above all with a severe, distant father, marked by war and loneliness. A man difficult to understand, yet capable of arousing deep and silent admiration.

‘The African

‘ is the story of a double discovery: of a continent that imposes itself with its sensorial power and of a parent who remains, for the child, an enigmatic figure to be approached with patience and desire. It’s in the bookshop with Bompiani

Friends, lovers, accomplices, they share the disenchantment, the love for an island that is attractive in the summer and not easy to live in the rest of the year, the curiosity for the mysteries of the human soul, even those that lead to crimes, solitary or organized, and to the actions of the underworld armed with Kalashnikovs. And it is Alessandra who picks up the threads of the investigation that Crissanti, thoughtful and patient, does not abandon even when he seems to arrive at no certainty. And these two nearby solitudes in turn tell of the struggle to understand each other, find each other, understand each other. A noir of very fine psychological investigation.

He arrives at the bookstore with Fazi ‘Honeymourning’ by crime writer Franck Thilliez. The new case entrusted to Commissioner Franck Sharko proves to be complex and disturbing right from the crime scene: the body of a woman is found inside the confessional of a church, kneeling, naked, completely shaved and with some specimens of the “death’s head sphinx” moth resting on her head. The autopsy will reveal that she died due to a very rare form of malaria, transmitted by mosquitoes that do not exist in France. The insects are only the first of a series of gloomy elements that will reveal themselves to be part of the senseless plan hatched by the killer, and Sharko, together with the team of 36, will find themselves involved in a macabre treasure hunt in the vain hope of avoiding further murders. But the common thread traced by the culprit involves the deadly sins and the trumpets of the Apocalypse, in search of an ancient revenge whose seeds lurk in the heart of the Alps. Sharko, painfully marked by the tragic loss of his wife and daughter, will have to challenge the past to be able to prevent a massacre, and the resolution of the case will soon take on the contours of a descent into hell: to re-emerge from the horror he will be forced to save himself too.

After ‘1991’ and ‘Infernal Train to the Red Angel’, a new investigation by Commissioner Sharko, in its first Italian translation. Between squalid Parisian slums and disturbing abysses of corruption, the reader will also be trapped in the intricate web woven by the killer’s mind.

Thirty-three million fans. Over four million practitioners and more than one million registered footballers. Four world cups won. The most beautiful championship on the planet for over twenty years. Yet the Italian national team was out of the World Cup for the third consecutive time, the stadiums are dilapidated and professional football has accumulated over five billion in losses in just a few years. How is this possible? With an analysis rich in data, international comparisons and direct experience at the top of football institutions, Lorenzo Casini in ‘What remains of football’, in the bookshop with the Mill, reconstructs the reasons for this decline and captures its broader meaning: Italy’s inability to organize what it possesses. This book therefore offers a critical diagnosis and a recovery perspective, identifying the causes of the crisis, the false myths and possible remedies built on three interconnected pillars: infrastructure, resources and, above all, culture. Because football, before being an industry, remains a game. And it is from there, from the training, the technique and the imagination of a betrayed youth that a credible hope for the future of Italian football can arise.

Lorenzo Casini is rector and full professor of Administrative Law at the IMT School of Advanced Studies Lucca and president of the Institute for Research on Public Administration (Irpa). From March 2022 to December 2024 he was president of the National Professional League Serie A. For Il Mulino he published, among others, ‘Global Power. Rules and decisions beyond states’ (2018) and ‘Inheriting the future. Dilemmas about cultural heritage’ (2016).

It’s on the shelves with Solferino ‘The Justice of Inspector Falchi’ by Leonardo Duranti. A trail of crimes bloodies La Spezia. The first victim is a restaurateur found dead with an enigmatic message next to his body, killed by an unusual weapon: a gun once issued only to the police. Soon, the same gun fires again: a second murder, an identical signature, a new enigma. And yet another. A serial killer plays with death like a puzzle, leaving clues that defy logic and insinuate a disturbing bond between the victims. A thread that leads to an elegant nautical club, where secrets, debts and dangerous relationships intertwine in silence. Carlo Falchi, police commissioner and former boxer who has just moved from Milan to La Spezia to escape the void left by the brutal murder of his wife Anita, is investigating with the help of inspector Sara Ferri, coordinated by an ambiguous superior, when his past comes knocking on the door again with the face of revenge. And soon Falchi finds himself between two fires: an investigation that is revealing increasingly dark secrets and the threat to his own life.

A breathless and hopeless debut noir in which La Spezia, suspended between the beauty of its sea and the turbidity of corruption and injustice, becomes the setting for a painful and intense personal turning point. Welcome to the dark side of the Gulf of Poets.

He goes out with Rizzoli ‘A sea of silence’ by Cristina Rava. On a cold New Year’s afternoon, in the Ligurian hinterland, the medical examiner Ardelia Spinola is called to the scene of a brutal crime: an esteemed pediatrician and a young worker – both Algerians who emigrated to Italy – were shot dead. It could be a news story like many others, with explanations ready to make their way through suspicions and rumors: terrorism, score settling, revenge. But when Ardelia finds a USB stick with an Arabic text and decides to look further, the investigation changes pace and becomes a slippery slope, full of reticence and threats.

Between the prejudices of a closed community, the leads that contradict each other and the help of the elderly Gabriel – a cultured and polyglot man, living memory of a family history marked by the Holocaust – Ardelia is forced to recompose a mosaic of broken lives to arrive at an uncomfortable truth. With A sea of ​​silence, Cristina Rava signs a tight novel, which intertwines classic detective stories and psychological tension and follows the obstinate search for possible justice, in a province that does not forget and does not forgive.