Ada d’Adamo is mother to Daria. Their days are absorbed by caregiving and routine. Daria’s profound needs remained undetected in pregnancy, and with her birth, Ada’s world is remade.

As a dancer she must use her physicality in new ways, to keep her daughter safe. As a writer she must find a language to communicate beyond words. And when, on the cusp of her fifties, Ada herself becomes gravely ill, she takes the most courageous decision of all: to leave Daria their story.

This is Gravity, a journey of isolation, anger and sometimes despair, through moments of joy and exquisite tenderness, towards a love stronger than life.

'A magnificent book. A wonderful dialogue between a mother and a daughter... A story like this belongs to everyone. It's a gift: in these cases we say thank you, and we smile.' La Repubblica Concita de Gregorio

'A book about pain is successful when it is also a book full of happiness. And when you read the first page, you understand that Come d'aira is a book that radiates happiness.' Corriere della Sera Paolo di Stefano

Translator bio
Alex Valente (he/him) is a bisexual bilingual Britalian on xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səlilwətaɬ land. He can be found in tiny writing on the credits page of books, when publishers remember to name the translator.

Author bio
Ada d’Adamo was an essayist and poet from Italy. After giving birth to her disabled daughter Aria, d’Adamo became an advocate for people with disabilities and for interabled families. While working on a memoir for her daughter, she was diagnosed with stage four breast cancer. She passed away on the 1st of April 2023. Three months later her memoir, Gravity, won the Strega Prize, Italy’s most prestigious literary award.

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Croatia, autumn 2022. The tourist season has ended, and Split settles into an uneasy quiet. Ines works the reception desk of a seaside hotel. Her mother, Katja, a cleaner, keeps the family afloat and cares for Ines and her younger brother, Mario. When Inspector Zvone is called to an abandoned factory on the city’s edge, he finds the body of seventeen-year-old Viktorija, daughter of a respected local doctor. The murder shocks the community and sends ripples through the lives of Ines, Katja, and Zvone—each forced to confront truths they would rather keep buried. As suspicion deepens and loyalties fracture, Mother of Sorrows becomes a devastating exploration of love, guilt, and denial. With quiet ferocity, it confronts us with a haunting question: what are we willing to sacrifice to protect those we love—and what are the consequences when we do?

“Mother of Sorrows,” translated from the Croatian by Matt Robinson, is told in short chapters from its various characters’ points of view. The story is a police procedural with benefits: an investigatory chronicle that explores issues of free will and fate (“there was something toxic and corrupting in their blood,” Ines thinks of her family) against a backdrop of consumerist glamour and moral decay — The Wall Street Journal

Translator bio
Matt Robinson (1978) is a former Reuters foreign correspondent. He translates books by Croatian, Serbian and Bosnian writers, including the works of the award-winning Croatian crime writer Jurica Pavičić.

Author bio
Jurica Pavičić (1965) is a Croatian novelist, screenwriter, short-story writer and journalist. His crime novel Red Water (published in Croatian in 2017 and in English in 2025) won ‘Le Point’ award and ‘Grand prix de la littérature policière’’ for the best European crime novel in 2021. The Sunday Times named the English edition of Red Water 'Best Crime Novel 2025'.

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A young man is gripped by one fear: that he’ll lose his mind. In his family, mental illness has shaped lives for generations, and time in psychiatric wards has become almost a rite of passage. His battle to avoid inheriting his grandmother’s suicidal behavior, his mother’s bipolar disorder, or his father’s bouts with alcoholism and depression spurs him to flee Germany for New York, via Paris and Vienna, only to end up in just the kind of mental institution that so terrified him. But he works there as a psychologist rather than undergo treatment as a patient himself, and learns that a person is always more than a diagnosis. In this picaresque novel, a potent blend of memoir and fiction, the protagonist is forced to confront the question he has avoided all his life: What is normal?

“Irresistible. A book that is at once grave and light, tender and tough, satirical and earnest.” — Siri Hustvedt, author of The Shaking Woman or a History of My Nerves and Ghost Stories

“Illuminating . . . moves at a roving pace . . . Botany of Madness is a riveting novel in which a man weighs mental illness with prismatic precision, his work involving scientific classifications, autofiction, and memory.” — Foreword Reviews

Translator bio
Alexandra Roesch has translated twelve works of fiction and nonfiction including writings by Hans Fallada, Seraina Kobler, and Stefanie vor Schulte, and has been awarded the inaugural John Calder Translation Prize. Based in Frankfurt, she holds an MA in translation from the University of Bristol.

Author bio
Leon Engler grew up in Munich and studied theater, film, and psychology in Vienna, Paris, and Berlin. He has published several plays and short stories and works as an author, psychologist, and lecturer in psychology and creative writing. Botany of Madness is his first novel.

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