BOOK CLUB
Book of the month:
Verdigris
by Michele Mari
Translated by Brian Rober Moore
Special guest: Brian Robert Moore, translator, winner of the 2025 PEN Translation Prize and the 2025 Italian Prose in Translation Award
Synopsis
At the tail end of the 1960s, the thirteen-year-old Michelino spends his summers at his grandparents’ modest estate in Nasca, near Lake Maggiore, losing himself in the tales of horror, adventure, and mystery shelved in his grandfather’s library. The greatest mystery he’s ever encountered, however, doesn’t come from a book—it’s the groundskeeper, Felice, a sometimes frightening, sometimes gentle, always colorful man of uncertain age who speaks an enchanting dialect and whose memory gets worse with each passing day. When Michelino volunteers to help the old man by providing him with clever mnemonic devices to keep his memory alive, the boy soon finds himself obsessed with piecing together the eerie hodgepodge of Felice’s biography . . . a quest that leads them into an enthralling hell of long-buried secrets, legendary partisans, murdered Nazis, thefts, lies, doppelgängers, insatiable slugs, and the unquiet dead.
And yet nothing could be more fascinating to Michelino than Felice’s own secret origins. Where did he come from? Is he the victim or the villain of his story? Is he a noble hero, a holy fool, or perhaps the very thing that Michelino most wants and fears: a real-life monster.
“Superbly translated… Verdigris is a delightful game, up until the moment it turns deadly serious.” – Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal
“A magical novel not to be missed.” World Literature Today
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