In Scauri, an end of the line seaside town forty miles or so from Rome, Vittoria dies unexpectedly in her bath. Whilst the townsfolk meet the event with sad but respectful southern Italian silence, Lea, the town lawyer, wants to investigate. Who was Vittoria, what were her secrets, why had she mysteriously arrived in Scauri thirty years earlier? And was her relationship with Lea all that it seemed?

In this unforgettable portrait of a small town and the women who live there, reverberations from the past catch up with present. Through the silences, Vittoria’s story is revealed and everything - passions, emotions, and relationships - changes forever.

Novelist, editor, critic, cultural commentator and mathematician Chiara Valerio is a sensation in Italy and The Little I Knew is a huge bestseller. It was shortlisted for the 2024 Premio Strega.

“Enigmatic and beguiling, precise and unsettling, this seductive novel opens with a mysterious death, asking compelling questions about desire, knowability and the still limited possibilities of freedom for women. Chiara Valerio is a major talent.” OLIVIA LAING

“With wit, subtlety and charm, Valerio captures the complex currents of secrecy and desire that is just under the surface of small-town and family life. A beguiling, atmospheric story of female fascinations.” SARAH WATERS

“The writing is nimble and on point. The structure is tight. With a death at the beginning, it reminds me of Ginzburg or Sciascia.” JHUMPA LAHIRI
“The narrative is an enchantment of phantasmagorical goings-on and the small realities of provincial life.” DACIA MARAINI

“In the story Chiara Valerio tells, there is something of the relationship between Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf, something of that elegance and of those gardens, of gentle slowness and ancient bonds.” VALERIA PARRELLA, GRAZIA

“Chiara Valerio plays with the noir genre and transforms it; rather she reveals what is at its heart. Yes of course we need to find out how Vittoria died. But maybe it’s more crucial to find out how Vittoria lived.” PAOLO DI PAOLO, LA REPUBBLICA

Author bio
CHIARA VALERIO was born in Scauri in 1978 and lives in Rome. She has published essays, novels, short stories, including: La gioia piccola d’esser quasi salvi (2009), Spiaggia libera tutti (2010), Il cuore non si vede (2019), La matematica è politica (2020), Nessuna scuola mi consola (2021), Così per sempre (2022), La tecnologia è religione (2023)

Translator bio
AILSA WOOD is a translator from Italian and French. Her work on Stefano Benni’s monologues from Le Beatrici was the winner of the prestigious John Dryden Translation Prize in 2022. Besides her work as a literary translator, she works across various related sectors including wine and tourism. Ailsa has an M.A. in Literary Translation (with Distinction) from the University of East Anglia and lives in Italy.

BUY THE BOOK: https://www.foundryeditions.co.uk/thelittleiknew

Author bio
Marina Ponomarenko lives and works in Kyiv. She has a degree in Dramatic Writing for Film and Television, and she is a contemporary poetess who gives regular live performances of her work. Her second poetry collection has just been published by Ukraine’s Old Lion Publishing House.
Marina's second poetry anthology (just out):
https://starylev.com.ua/knyga-putivnyk-po-urvyshhu-y-okolycyax
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/marina.ponomarenko

Translator bio
Richard translates from Russian and Ukrainian into English. Recent publications include poetry in the bilingual anthologies ‘Disbelief’ and ‘Dislocation’, Elena Dolgopyat’s short story collection ‘Someone Else’s Life’, and Alexei Ivanov’s novel ‘The Food Block’.
Website: https://richardcoombeslanguageservices.com/
Blue Sky @richtranslator.bsky.social

Currently, Richard is collaborating with the Ukrainian novelist Anna Bugayeva, and translating the Ukrainian poetess Marina Ponomarenko and other contemporary Ukrainian poets. The ‘Disbelief’ and ‘Dislocation’ team is also preparing a third anthology.

Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Richard has been teaching English to Ukrainian refugees and running conversation clubs and other language coaching sessions for Ukrainians in the UK, Ukraine, and other European countries.

Translated from the Slovak by Julia and Peter Sherwood

The nine stories comprising the collection The Last Thing depict the rise of fascism and its dangers for the Jewish community in Slovakia through the concentration camps and the partisan fight against the Germans, concluding with a devastating summation of all that had been lost and destroyed in the war. Drawing on his own experience, Leopold Lahola explores moral ambivalences, instead a simple opposition of good versus evil. He punctures the standard historical image of the partisan fighters by depicting their heroism alongside their cruelty and pettiness while also showing how often bravery and madness, kindness and stupidity can coexist. His sequence of compelling World War II stories offers starkly new perspectives on the tragedy and grandeur of that momentous time in history. Virtually uknown abroad and almost forgotten in Slovakia, these stories are finally available in an English translation.
The translation and publication of this work was supported using public funding by the Slovak Arts Council and by Slovak Literature Abroad (SLOLA).

BUY THE BOOK: https://karolinum.cz/en/books/lahola-the-last-thing-31322

Author bio
Leopold Lahola (1918-1968) managed to escape deportation to a concentration camp as a young man and fought in the anti-Nazi resistance. After the war, following the 1949 Communist takeover, his promising career as a playwright was cut short by a vicious campaign accusing him of promoting "existentialist values". In 1949 Lahola emigrated to Israel, where he worked in film before moving to West Germany, where he also worked in film and TV. He emerged from obscurity during the brief thaw of the 1968 Prague Spring, when he was able to return to his homeland and thrive as a playwright and film director. His short story collection The Last Thing finally appeared in Slovakia in early 1968, but sadly, only a few months later, he died of a heart attack just before his 50th birthday. The book was not viewed favourably by the hardline regime that followed the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia and this work of Lahola’s fell into obscurity again until it was republished in 1994.

Translator bio
Julia Sherwood is a translator (with Peter Sherwood) from Slovak, Czech, Polish, Russian and German into English as well as into Slovak. She was born and grew up in Bratislava, Slovakia, and studied English and Slavonic languages and literature in Cologne, London and Munich. She was editor-at-large for Slovakia for Asymptote (2013–2023). She co-curates SlovakLiterature.com and is the editor of Seagull Books’ Slovak list. Julia and Peter have translated into English some thirty books by mostly contemporary Slovak and Czech writers. Their most recent translations are The Bonnet by Katarína Kucbelová, Seven Days to the Funeral by Ján Rozner and This Room Is Impossible To Eat by Nicol Hochholczerová.
Peter Sherwood is a translator and scholar. He taught at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, from 1972 to 2007. From 2008 until his retirement in 2014, he was László Birinyi, Sr, Distinguished Professor of Hungarian Language and Culture in the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Peter’s translations from the Hungarian include several short collections, as well novels, most recently Krisztina Tóth’s prize-winning Barcode and Krisztián Grecsó’s Vera.