1Il grande mantenutoTragicomic Novel - Alberto Ravasio - Quodlibet - 26/03/2026 - 18+A young graduate who dreams of becoming a writer, born into a family where no one reads, lets himself be kept by whoever comes along the social ladder, from a lesbian couple to a sex worker to the shady publishing world, before falling for a philosophy student from Milan's upper class.Il grande mantenuto (roughly, The Great Kept Man), published by Quodlibet in its Compagnia Extra series, is the novel that confirms Alberto Ravasio as one of the sharpest voices in recent Italian fiction. Its protagonist is a young graduate with a vague degree, raised in a family where no one reads, who leaves Bergamo chasing the dream of living off writing as though it were an actual profession. To survive, he lets himself be kept by whoever comes along, moving up and down the social ladder, he lives for a while with a lesbian couple from Lecco, writes hidden away in a sex worker's dressing room in Brescia, visits the crumbling home of Europe's most celebrated and penniless writer, and takes on the role of manuscript pusher in the world of small-press publishing. When he falls for a philosophy student raised in Milan's wealthy Navigli district, he discovers a world that turns out to be even more dependent than his own. The title plays on a double meaning that runs through the whole book, the great kept man is the penniless aspiring writer, but great kept men are also cultural professionals born into wealth, and today's thirty-somethings trapped in a permanent economic adolescence. Set between 2008 and 2020, from the global financial crisis to the pandemic, the novel has been described by several critics as an updated, now-impossible Martin Eden, portraying how the end of the twentieth century's great social struggles has pushed society back toward an almost nineteenth-century economic rigidity, in which culture is a tax deduction for the rich and a plunging social elevator for everyone else. Ravasio's style, already noted for blending sharp irony with existential unease, moves here in a tragicomic, paradoxical register, offering an unsparingly clear-eyed portrait of the economic and emotional fragility of a generation of would-be intellectuals with no safety net. Aimed less at the mass audience than at engaged criticism, the novel was named among the most significant Italian fiction titles of 2026 by the quality-focused ranking compiled by the magazine L'Indiscreto, a recognition that affirms its literary value independent of sales figures.see full review ▶ amazon.it
18votesvote
2The WidowLegal Mystery - John Grisham - Doubleday - 21/10/2025 - 13+Simon Latch, a struggling small-town lawyer with a failing marriage, is hired by an elderly widow to draft a new will hiding a secret fortune. When she is found murdered, Simon becomes the prime suspect and must uncover the real killer to clear his name.The Widow marks a turning point in John Grisham's long career: for the first time, the author of The Firm and A Time to Kill builds a genuine whodunit, a mystery in which the reader is meant to uncover the killer alongside the protagonist, rather than follow a trial toward an already foreseeable outcome. At the center of the story is Simon Latch, a lawyer in Braxton, a fictional small town in Virginia, crushed by a failing marriage and a practice reduced to bankruptcy filings and low-stakes disputes. When elderly Eleanor Netty Barnett hires him to draft a new will hiding an undeclared multimillion-dollar fortune, Simon glimpses a way out of his financial mediocrity and begins scheming to claim it for himself. The plot flips abruptly when Netty is found dead under circumstances police rule a homicide, and Simon, given his privileged position and his debts, becomes the prime suspect. From there the novel turns into a race against time, as the lawyer must prove his innocence by digging through a tangle of disgruntled heirs, old small-town grudges and family secrets buried for decades, while his professional and personal credibility crumbles under the gaze of the small community he lives in. Grisham keeps the lean, functional style that made his career, alternating short chapters and a brisk pace with precise depictions of how the American justice system actually works, terrain the author, a former lawyer himself, knows better than almost anyone else writing genre fiction. Compared with his more classic legal thrillers, built around sprawling trials and corporate conspiracies, the scale here is deliberately more intimate and small-town, closer to the tradition of the puzzle mystery than to the courtroom thriller that built his reputation with books like The Firm or The Pelican Brief. The novel doesn't overhaul the Grisham formula so much as bend it toward a different subgenre, showing that after more than three decades of writing he can still experiment while remaining unmistakably himself. Longtime readers will find the elements they love, a morally compromised protagonist, a Southern small-town setting, a pace built for a handful of sittings, while newer readers get a leaner entry point than the ensemble novels that built the author's fame. The book debuted at number one on the New York Times fiction bestseller list and remains among the top sellers in bookstores worldwide, confirming Grisham's ability, decades into his career, to remain one of the most widely read authors alive.see full review ▶ amazon.it
11votesvote
3La fine del mondoLiterary Novel - Francesco Pecoraro - Ponte alle Grazie - 20/02/2026 - 16+An elderly man delivers a long monologue from the kitchen of his Roman apartment, recalling his life, a beloved Greek island from his youth, and a city and world that seem to be approaching their end. A reflective novel that moves between irony and lyricism on the twilight of an era.La fine del mondo (The End of the World), published by Ponte alle Grazie, confirms Francesco Pecoraro as one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary Italian fiction, following the acclaim of La vita in tempo di pace (Life in Wartime), the 2013 novel that established him with critics and readers alike. The new book largely abandons a conventional plot structure in favor of a long stream of consciousness, an elderly man, sitting in the kitchen of his apartment in Rome's Prati district, retraces his life in a monologue that moves through association, digression and return. There is no story to summarize in the conventional sense, but rather a kind of mental work in progress in which the narrator recalls a beloved Greek island from his youth and the people who populated it, observes today's Rome with a gaze that is both affectionate and unsparing, and questions a nation and a society that have become unrecognizable from the ones he grew up in. The title should be read in the plural, the end of the world Pecoraro writes about is the end of a life nearing its close, but also the end of a political project, an urban model, a culture, a climate balance now compromised, against the backdrop of a looming war that hums like background noise of the present. The style shifts naturally between opposite registers, moving from sharp, almost sarcastic irony to passages of intense lyrical poetry, in dense, layered prose that demands a reader's attention and willingness to follow a train of thought that never proceeds in a straight line. It is a novel that rejects the logic of the effect-driven story in favor of depth of reflection, in keeping with the analytical vocation that has always defined the author. It is precisely this stylistic density that makes La fine del mondo a book for demanding readers rather than the mass audience, fittingly, it was the quality-focused ranking compiled by the magazine L'Indiscreto that singled it out in 2026 as the year's best Italian novel on purely literary grounds, a recognition that has established itself in recent years as one of the most authoritative voices in Italian criticism, independent of sales figures.see full review ▶ amazon.it
10votesvote
4Dungeon Crawler Carl+ add descriptionThe LitRPG series *Dungeon Crawler Carl* by Matt Dinniman, published in Italy by Mercurio Books, continues to achieve success with volumes released in 2026, such as *Judgment Day* and *The Anarchist’s Cookbook*. The saga, set in a dungeon created after an apocalypse that transforms Earth into an intergalactic show, follows the adventures of former soldier Carl and his talking cat Princess Donut, blending action, dark humor, and social satire. Dinniman’s direct and fast-paced style, combined with worldbuilding that explores the ruthless mechanics of a media-driven system, has won over readers, making the series a popular phenomenon that transcends mere entertainment for video game enthusiasts.see full review ▶ amazon.it
9votesvote
5London FallingNarrative Nonfiction (True Crime) - Patrick Radden Keefe - Doubleday - 07/04/2026 - 16+In 2019, 19-year-old Zac Brettler falls from a London balcony into the Thames. His parents discover he had posed as the son of a Russian oligarch to break into high society, entangled with shady businessmen and organized crime. A narrative investigation into the truth behind his death.London Falling, published by Doubleday in 2025, is the latest work of narrative nonfiction from Patrick Radden Keefe, the New Yorker staff writer who established himself as one of the decade's most widely read nonfiction authors with Say Nothing, his award-winning book on the Troubles in Northern Ireland, later adapted into a television series. The new book applies the same investigative rigor to an unresolved British case, the death of Zac Brettler, a 19-year-old who fell in 2019 from a fifth-floor balcony of a London building into the Thames. The official verdict, suicide, never satisfied his family, who in their grief discovered something unsettling, for months Zac had been posing as the son of a wealthy Russian oligarch in order to work his way into the capital's most exclusive circles. Through this invented identity, the teenager had come into contact with a shady businessman named Akbar Shamji and a dangerous criminal known as Indian Dave, moving through an underworld of private nightclubs, luxury mansions and money of murky origin. Keefe reconstructs step by step the investigation carried out by Zac's parents, increasingly convinced that something darker than a voluntary act claimed their son's life, and increasingly frustrated by Scotland Yard's apparent inability, or unwillingness, to pursue those responsible. The book reads with the pace of a thriller while remaining grounded in the source-checking and documentation typical of the best investigative journalism, the same quality that has made Keefe a benchmark of literary true crime. Compared with Say Nothing, where capital-H History formed the backdrop to an unsolved killing, here the scope is narrower and, at the same time, more universal, through the story of a single teenager, Keefe opens a window onto the London of the ultra-rich, untraceable fortunes and the gray zones where money buys silence and impunity. The book has been very well received by critics and readers alike, confirming Keefe as one of the most acclaimed nonfiction authors working today and fueling renewed public interest in a case that, years later, remains officially without a definitive explanation.see full review ▶ amazon.it
8votesvote
6The HousemaidPsychological Thriller - Freida McFadden - Grand Central Publishing - 23/08/2022 - 16+Millie, a young woman with a troubled past seeking a fresh start, takes a live-in housekeeping job with the wealthy Winchester family on Long Island. Behind the household's polished surface lies a web of secrets and deception that pulls her into a spiral of manipulation and danger.The Housemaid, the novel that turned Freida McFadden into an international phenomenon of psychological suspense, follows Millie, a young woman recently released from prison and struggling financially, who takes a live-in housekeeping job with Nina and Andrew Winchester, a wealthy couple on Long Island. From the opening pages, the Winchester household proves to be anything but a safe haven, Nina behaves unpredictably and coldly toward her, the bedroom assigned to Millie has no handle on the inside of the door, and Millie herself withholds uncomfortable details of her own past from the reader chapter after chapter. McFadden builds the novel through very short chapters and alternating points of view, a structure that has become the author's trademark, generating a narrative urgency that pulls readers through in a single sitting. The novel fits within the domestic-thriller tradition popularized by authors like Gillian Flynn and Paula Hawkins, but McFadden, a former physician who turned to writing full time, brings an even faster pace and a taste for jaw-dropping twists, typically concentrated in the book's final third, that completely overturns the reader's sense of who holds power over whom. It's precisely this ability to subvert expectations right up to the last pages that turned the novel into a publishing phenomenon, spawning two direct sequels, The Housemaid's Secret and The Housemaid Is Watching, along with a novella centered on the protagonist's wedding. First published in 2022 and already an international bestseller with millions of copies sold, the novel returned forcefully to the spotlight in 2025 thanks to the film adaptation directed by Paul Feig, starring Sydney Sweeney as Millie and Amanda Seyfried as Nina, which grossed more than 400 million dollars worldwide. The film's box-office success pushed the novel and its sequels back to the top of international bestseller charts, confirming the saga's ability to win over new audiences years after its original publication.see full review ▶ amazon.it
7votesvote
7The CorrespondentEpistolary Novel - Virginia Evans - Crown - 29/04/2025 - 13+Sybil Van Antwerp, a retired lawyer, pours her thoughts into a steady stream of letters, written to her brother, her best friend, admired authors and one unnamed recipient. Letter by letter, the novel uncovers the grief and loneliness hidden beneath a seemingly settled life.The Correspondent, the fiction debut of American author Virginia Evans published by Crown in 2025, spans a decade of life, from 2012 to 2022, through the device of epistolary correspondence, letters, and increasingly emails as the years pass, written by protagonist Sybil Van Antwerp, a seventysomething retired lawyer living in Bethany Beach, Delaware. Sybil writes daily, at an almost obsessive pace, addressing her thoughts to her brother, her lifelong best friend, the troubled son of a former colleague, the authors of books she reads, her neighbor, and a mysterious recipient the novel deliberately keeps in shadow for most of its length. Through this mosaic of voices and addressees, Evans builds the portrait of a tenacious, prickly woman who faces life with brisk practicality, behind which lies a grief never fully processed, the death of her second child at age eight. The epistolary form, far from a mere convenience, allows the author to gradually reveal her protagonist through the way she addresses different correspondents, rather than through third-person narration, the reader assembles Sybil like a puzzle, catching her sharp wit in letters to strangers and the vulnerability tucked into her more intimate ones. The technique recalls the tradition of the classic epistolary novel, but applied to a contemporary setting of emails, postcards and handwritten notes, in an era when the letter itself has become an almost anachronistic gesture. This formal choice, able to deliver intimacy without relying on elaborate plot machinery, has been singled out by several critics as the book's greatest strength, along with Evans's skill, in her first published novel after seven unpublished manuscripts, at balancing humor and emotion without tipping into sentimentality. Initially received through quiet word of mouth among readers devoted to literary fiction, The Correspondent grew slowly but steadily, eventually climbing, months after its release, to the top of the New York Times fiction bestseller list in February 2026, a rare outcome for a debut novel and for a genre, the epistolary form, generally considered niche next to the major commercial bestsellers.see full review ▶ amazon.it
5votesvote
81929Historical Nonfiction - Andrew Ross Sorkin - Viking - 14/10/2025 - 13+A sweeping historical account of the 1929 Wall Street crash and the reckless speculation of the preceding boom years. Following the bankers, politicians and speculators whose missteps dragged America from economic euphoria into the Great Depression.1929, Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History, published by Viking in the fall of 2025, is the new book from Andrew Ross Sorkin, the New York Times financial journalist and author, nearly two decades ago, of Too Big to Fail, the account of the 2008 financial crisis that became a publishing sensation and was later adapted into a film. With this new work, Sorkin travels back a century to reconstruct the Wall Street crash of October 1929, and above all the years that preceded it, when reckless speculation, easy credit and blind faith in the stock market's endless growth had turned trading into a mass phenomenon. Drawing on historical archives and partly unpublished documents, the author reconstructs the period stretching from the final years of the Coolidge presidency through the handoff from Hoover to Roosevelt, delivering a sprawling group portrait of bankers, politicians, speculators and small investors swept up by the same forces. The book stands out for a narrative approach closer to storytelling than academic history, a mode Sorkin had already used successfully in Too Big to Fail, historical figures such as Wall Street bankers, Federal Reserve officials and political leaders of the era are treated as characters in an ensemble drama, with dialogue reconstructed from documentary sources and a narrative pace designed to make the complexity of the financial mechanisms behind the collapse accessible even to non-specialists. Sorkin devotes considerable space to the political and regulatory failures that allowed the speculative bubble to inflate unchecked, indirectly offering a lens through which to view more recent financial crises, from 2008 onward. The book has not been without critics, particularly from free-market circles that have taken issue with passages they consider too favorable toward state intervention in the economy, but the historical reconstruction and quality of the writing have been widely acknowledged even by those who dispute its political framing. Received as one of the season's most notable nonfiction releases, the book has been called by several outlets essential reading for understanding the distant roots of modern financial crises, and it climbed quickly up US nonfiction bestseller lists, confirming the public's enduring appetite for economic history told with narrative drive.see full review ▶ amazon.it
4votesvote
9AlaskaLiterary Novel - Valentina Maini - Bollati Boringhieri - 27/02/2026 - 16+In Venice, young artist Maia enters a clandestine affair with Sergio, a married fisherman much older than her. Amid recurring fantasies of a remote island and a deep friendship with Louis, who takes her in, Maia confronts the wounds of her childhood while searching for her identity as an artist.Alaska, published by Bollati Boringhieri, is the new novel by Valentina Maini, the Bologna-based author who made her fiction debut with La mischia and quickly established herself as one of the most distinctive voices in new Italian writing. Its protagonist is Maia, a young aspiring artist who, in a Venice suspended between reality and hallucination, enters a clandestine relationship with Sergio, a married fisherman much older than her, a bond that pulls her into a vortex of desire and possible personal shipwreck. Around this forbidden love story, the novel builds a network of presences that become just as central, recurring fantasies of a mysterious, remote island that gives the book its title, and above all a deep bond with Louis, the young man who takes Maia into his eccentric Venetian apartment and gradually becomes her most stable emotional anchor, in counterpoint to her volatile passion for Sergio. Through these relationships, Maia is forced to confront the deepest wounds of her childhood, in a painful but necessary process the author stages without flinching, following her protagonist as she sinks as deeply into love as into her own mind, in a state permanently balanced between sanity and vertigo. Like La mischia before it, the novel moves in a lyrical, fragmented style characteristic of Maini's writing, weaving together different timelines and a strong introspective streak, avoiding a linear plot in favor of a progression built on images and sensations. The underlying question, made explicit by the author herself, is what it truly means to become an artist, and how the line between balance and collapse, between love and friendship, between desire and the need for protection, is in fact unstable and constantly shifting. Less geared toward the mass commercial bestseller audience than other titles of the season, Alaska has found a devoted readership among serious literary readers and a very favorable critical reception, confirming Maini as one of the most mature and closely watched Italian authors under 40. The novel appeared among the standout titles in the quality-focused ranking curated by the magazine L'Indiscreto in 2026, a recognition that certifies its literary value beyond its niche place in the publishing landscape.see full review ▶ amazon.it
3votesvote
10The LookIllustrated Nonfiction (Fashion) - Michelle Obama - Crown - 04/11/2025 - All agesMichelle Obama, together with longtime stylist Meredith Koop, traces her style evolution across more than 200 photographs, from her years in the White House to her public life afterward. A visual and written account of how clothing became, for her, a tool of communication as well as expression.The Look, published by Crown in 2025, is the new book from Michelle Obama, co-written with Meredith Koop, the stylist who worked alongside the former first lady for much of her public life, with a foreword by art and African American culture historian Farah Jasmine Griffin. Through more than two hundred photographs and Obama's own first-person accounts, the book traces the evolution of her style from the years of her husband Barack Obama's Senate campaign, through eight years in the White House, to her public life afterward. It is not, however, a simple catalog of outfits and public appearances, the book focuses on how every stylistic choice, from the bright sheath dresses and cardigans of her first-lady years to the tailored suits, denim and braids of her post-presidential period, was always deliberate and considered, often serving a specific role in political and public communication. Alongside Obama's own voice, the book gathers contributions from those who worked daily on shaping her image, besides Koop, it features makeup artist Carl Ray and hairstylists Yene Damtew, Johnny Wright and Njeri Radway, together with several designers who dressed the former first lady for the most significant occasions of her public career. This chorus of voices allows the book to move beyond the purely aesthetic and become a broader reflection on the relationship between public image and power, particularly for a woman who was the first Black first lady in United States history and had to contend with constant media scrutiny of every detail of her appearance. The book thus joins a tradition of writing about fashion as political language, but does so from the singular vantage point of someone who lived that pressure firsthand for more than fifteen years in the spotlight. Received very positively by critics and the public, The Look debuted at the top of US nonfiction bestseller lists and won the NAACP Image Award, confirming Michelle Obama's ability, already demonstrated with the bestseller Becoming, to turn an account of her personal experience into a publishing success that appeals to fashion enthusiasts and readers of political and social nonfiction alike.see full review ▶ amazon.it
Il grande mantenuto
A young graduate who dreams of becoming a writer, born into a family where no one reads, lets himself be kept by whoever comes along the social ladder, from a lesbian couple to a sex worker to the shady publishing world, before falling for a philosophy student from Milan's upper class.
Il grande mantenuto (roughly, The Great Kept Man), published by Quodlibet in its Compagnia Extra series, is the novel that confirms Alberto Ravasio as one of the sharpest voices in recent Italian fiction. Its protagonist is a young graduate with a vague degree, raised in a family where no one reads, who leaves Bergamo chasing the dream of living off writing as though it were an actual profession. To survive, he lets himself be kept by whoever comes along, moving up and down the social ladder, he lives for a while with a lesbian couple from Lecco, writes hidden away in a sex worker's dressing room in Brescia, visits the crumbling home of Europe's most celebrated and penniless writer, and takes on the role of manuscript pusher in the world of small-press publishing. When he falls for a philosophy student raised in Milan's wealthy Navigli district, he discovers a world that turns out to be even more dependent than his own. The title plays on a double meaning that runs through the whole book, the great kept man is the penniless aspiring writer, but great kept men are also cultural professionals born into wealth, and today's thirty-somethings trapped in a permanent economic adolescence. Set between 2008 and 2020, from the global financial crisis to the pandemic, the novel has been described by several critics as an updated, now-impossible Martin Eden, portraying how the end of the twentieth century's great social struggles has pushed society back toward an almost nineteenth-century economic rigidity, in which culture is a tax deduction for the rich and a plunging social elevator for everyone else. Ravasio's style, already noted for blending sharp irony with existential unease, moves here in a tragicomic, paradoxical register, offering an unsparingly clear-eyed portrait of the economic and emotional fragility of a generation of would-be intellectuals with no safety net. Aimed less at the mass audience than at engaged criticism, the novel was named among the most significant Italian fiction titles of 2026 by the quality-focused ranking compiled by the magazine L'Indiscreto, a recognition that affirms its literary value independent of sales figures.
see full review
The Widow
Simon Latch, a struggling small-town lawyer with a failing marriage, is hired by an elderly widow to draft a new will hiding a secret fortune. When she is found murdered, Simon becomes the prime suspect and must uncover the real killer to clear his name.
The Widow marks a turning point in John Grisham's long career: for the first time, the author of The Firm and A Time to Kill builds a genuine whodunit, a mystery in which the reader is meant to uncover the killer alongside the protagonist, rather than follow a trial toward an already foreseeable outcome. At the center of the story is Simon Latch, a lawyer in Braxton, a fictional small town in Virginia, crushed by a failing marriage and a practice reduced to bankruptcy filings and low-stakes disputes. When elderly Eleanor Netty Barnett hires him to draft a new will hiding an undeclared multimillion-dollar fortune, Simon glimpses a way out of his financial mediocrity and begins scheming to claim it for himself. The plot flips abruptly when Netty is found dead under circumstances police rule a homicide, and Simon, given his privileged position and his debts, becomes the prime suspect. From there the novel turns into a race against time, as the lawyer must prove his innocence by digging through a tangle of disgruntled heirs, old small-town grudges and family secrets buried for decades, while his professional and personal credibility crumbles under the gaze of the small community he lives in. Grisham keeps the lean, functional style that made his career, alternating short chapters and a brisk pace with precise depictions of how the American justice system actually works, terrain the author, a former lawyer himself, knows better than almost anyone else writing genre fiction. Compared with his more classic legal thrillers, built around sprawling trials and corporate conspiracies, the scale here is deliberately more intimate and small-town, closer to the tradition of the puzzle mystery than to the courtroom thriller that built his reputation with books like The Firm or The Pelican Brief. The novel doesn't overhaul the Grisham formula so much as bend it toward a different subgenre, showing that after more than three decades of writing he can still experiment while remaining unmistakably himself. Longtime readers will find the elements they love, a morally compromised protagonist, a Southern small-town setting, a pace built for a handful of sittings, while newer readers get a leaner entry point than the ensemble novels that built the author's fame. The book debuted at number one on the New York Times fiction bestseller list and remains among the top sellers in bookstores worldwide, confirming Grisham's ability, decades into his career, to remain one of the most widely read authors alive.
see full review
La fine del mondo
An elderly man delivers a long monologue from the kitchen of his Roman apartment, recalling his life, a beloved Greek island from his youth, and a city and world that seem to be approaching their end. A reflective novel that moves between irony and lyricism on the twilight of an era.
La fine del mondo (The End of the World), published by Ponte alle Grazie, confirms Francesco Pecoraro as one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary Italian fiction, following the acclaim of La vita in tempo di pace (Life in Wartime), the 2013 novel that established him with critics and readers alike. The new book largely abandons a conventional plot structure in favor of a long stream of consciousness, an elderly man, sitting in the kitchen of his apartment in Rome's Prati district, retraces his life in a monologue that moves through association, digression and return. There is no story to summarize in the conventional sense, but rather a kind of mental work in progress in which the narrator recalls a beloved Greek island from his youth and the people who populated it, observes today's Rome with a gaze that is both affectionate and unsparing, and questions a nation and a society that have become unrecognizable from the ones he grew up in. The title should be read in the plural, the end of the world Pecoraro writes about is the end of a life nearing its close, but also the end of a political project, an urban model, a culture, a climate balance now compromised, against the backdrop of a looming war that hums like background noise of the present. The style shifts naturally between opposite registers, moving from sharp, almost sarcastic irony to passages of intense lyrical poetry, in dense, layered prose that demands a reader's attention and willingness to follow a train of thought that never proceeds in a straight line. It is a novel that rejects the logic of the effect-driven story in favor of depth of reflection, in keeping with the analytical vocation that has always defined the author. It is precisely this stylistic density that makes La fine del mondo a book for demanding readers rather than the mass audience, fittingly, it was the quality-focused ranking compiled by the magazine L'Indiscreto that singled it out in 2026 as the year's best Italian novel on purely literary grounds, a recognition that has established itself in recent years as one of the most authoritative voices in Italian criticism, independent of sales figures.
see full review
Dungeon Crawler Carl
+ add description
The LitRPG series *Dungeon Crawler Carl* by Matt Dinniman, published in Italy by Mercurio Books, continues to achieve success with volumes released in 2026, such as *Judgment Day* and *The Anarchist’s Cookbook*. The saga, set in a dungeon created after an apocalypse that transforms Earth into an intergalactic show, follows the adventures of former soldier Carl and his talking cat Princess Donut, blending action, dark humor, and social satire. Dinniman’s direct and fast-paced style, combined with worldbuilding that explores the ruthless mechanics of a media-driven system, has won over readers, making the series a popular phenomenon that transcends mere entertainment for video game enthusiasts.
see full review
London Falling
In 2019, 19-year-old Zac Brettler falls from a London balcony into the Thames. His parents discover he had posed as the son of a Russian oligarch to break into high society, entangled with shady businessmen and organized crime. A narrative investigation into the truth behind his death.
London Falling, published by Doubleday in 2025, is the latest work of narrative nonfiction from Patrick Radden Keefe, the New Yorker staff writer who established himself as one of the decade's most widely read nonfiction authors with Say Nothing, his award-winning book on the Troubles in Northern Ireland, later adapted into a television series. The new book applies the same investigative rigor to an unresolved British case, the death of Zac Brettler, a 19-year-old who fell in 2019 from a fifth-floor balcony of a London building into the Thames. The official verdict, suicide, never satisfied his family, who in their grief discovered something unsettling, for months Zac had been posing as the son of a wealthy Russian oligarch in order to work his way into the capital's most exclusive circles. Through this invented identity, the teenager had come into contact with a shady businessman named Akbar Shamji and a dangerous criminal known as Indian Dave, moving through an underworld of private nightclubs, luxury mansions and money of murky origin. Keefe reconstructs step by step the investigation carried out by Zac's parents, increasingly convinced that something darker than a voluntary act claimed their son's life, and increasingly frustrated by Scotland Yard's apparent inability, or unwillingness, to pursue those responsible. The book reads with the pace of a thriller while remaining grounded in the source-checking and documentation typical of the best investigative journalism, the same quality that has made Keefe a benchmark of literary true crime. Compared with Say Nothing, where capital-H History formed the backdrop to an unsolved killing, here the scope is narrower and, at the same time, more universal, through the story of a single teenager, Keefe opens a window onto the London of the ultra-rich, untraceable fortunes and the gray zones where money buys silence and impunity. The book has been very well received by critics and readers alike, confirming Keefe as one of the most acclaimed nonfiction authors working today and fueling renewed public interest in a case that, years later, remains officially without a definitive explanation.
see full review
The Housemaid
Millie, a young woman with a troubled past seeking a fresh start, takes a live-in housekeeping job with the wealthy Winchester family on Long Island. Behind the household's polished surface lies a web of secrets and deception that pulls her into a spiral of manipulation and danger.
The Housemaid, the novel that turned Freida McFadden into an international phenomenon of psychological suspense, follows Millie, a young woman recently released from prison and struggling financially, who takes a live-in housekeeping job with Nina and Andrew Winchester, a wealthy couple on Long Island. From the opening pages, the Winchester household proves to be anything but a safe haven, Nina behaves unpredictably and coldly toward her, the bedroom assigned to Millie has no handle on the inside of the door, and Millie herself withholds uncomfortable details of her own past from the reader chapter after chapter. McFadden builds the novel through very short chapters and alternating points of view, a structure that has become the author's trademark, generating a narrative urgency that pulls readers through in a single sitting. The novel fits within the domestic-thriller tradition popularized by authors like Gillian Flynn and Paula Hawkins, but McFadden, a former physician who turned to writing full time, brings an even faster pace and a taste for jaw-dropping twists, typically concentrated in the book's final third, that completely overturns the reader's sense of who holds power over whom. It's precisely this ability to subvert expectations right up to the last pages that turned the novel into a publishing phenomenon, spawning two direct sequels, The Housemaid's Secret and The Housemaid Is Watching, along with a novella centered on the protagonist's wedding. First published in 2022 and already an international bestseller with millions of copies sold, the novel returned forcefully to the spotlight in 2025 thanks to the film adaptation directed by Paul Feig, starring Sydney Sweeney as Millie and Amanda Seyfried as Nina, which grossed more than 400 million dollars worldwide. The film's box-office success pushed the novel and its sequels back to the top of international bestseller charts, confirming the saga's ability to win over new audiences years after its original publication.
see full review
The Correspondent
Sybil Van Antwerp, a retired lawyer, pours her thoughts into a steady stream of letters, written to her brother, her best friend, admired authors and one unnamed recipient. Letter by letter, the novel uncovers the grief and loneliness hidden beneath a seemingly settled life.
The Correspondent, the fiction debut of American author Virginia Evans published by Crown in 2025, spans a decade of life, from 2012 to 2022, through the device of epistolary correspondence, letters, and increasingly emails as the years pass, written by protagonist Sybil Van Antwerp, a seventysomething retired lawyer living in Bethany Beach, Delaware. Sybil writes daily, at an almost obsessive pace, addressing her thoughts to her brother, her lifelong best friend, the troubled son of a former colleague, the authors of books she reads, her neighbor, and a mysterious recipient the novel deliberately keeps in shadow for most of its length. Through this mosaic of voices and addressees, Evans builds the portrait of a tenacious, prickly woman who faces life with brisk practicality, behind which lies a grief never fully processed, the death of her second child at age eight. The epistolary form, far from a mere convenience, allows the author to gradually reveal her protagonist through the way she addresses different correspondents, rather than through third-person narration, the reader assembles Sybil like a puzzle, catching her sharp wit in letters to strangers and the vulnerability tucked into her more intimate ones. The technique recalls the tradition of the classic epistolary novel, but applied to a contemporary setting of emails, postcards and handwritten notes, in an era when the letter itself has become an almost anachronistic gesture. This formal choice, able to deliver intimacy without relying on elaborate plot machinery, has been singled out by several critics as the book's greatest strength, along with Evans's skill, in her first published novel after seven unpublished manuscripts, at balancing humor and emotion without tipping into sentimentality. Initially received through quiet word of mouth among readers devoted to literary fiction, The Correspondent grew slowly but steadily, eventually climbing, months after its release, to the top of the New York Times fiction bestseller list in February 2026, a rare outcome for a debut novel and for a genre, the epistolary form, generally considered niche next to the major commercial bestsellers.
see full review
1929
A sweeping historical account of the 1929 Wall Street crash and the reckless speculation of the preceding boom years. Following the bankers, politicians and speculators whose missteps dragged America from economic euphoria into the Great Depression.
1929, Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History, published by Viking in the fall of 2025, is the new book from Andrew Ross Sorkin, the New York Times financial journalist and author, nearly two decades ago, of Too Big to Fail, the account of the 2008 financial crisis that became a publishing sensation and was later adapted into a film. With this new work, Sorkin travels back a century to reconstruct the Wall Street crash of October 1929, and above all the years that preceded it, when reckless speculation, easy credit and blind faith in the stock market's endless growth had turned trading into a mass phenomenon. Drawing on historical archives and partly unpublished documents, the author reconstructs the period stretching from the final years of the Coolidge presidency through the handoff from Hoover to Roosevelt, delivering a sprawling group portrait of bankers, politicians, speculators and small investors swept up by the same forces. The book stands out for a narrative approach closer to storytelling than academic history, a mode Sorkin had already used successfully in Too Big to Fail, historical figures such as Wall Street bankers, Federal Reserve officials and political leaders of the era are treated as characters in an ensemble drama, with dialogue reconstructed from documentary sources and a narrative pace designed to make the complexity of the financial mechanisms behind the collapse accessible even to non-specialists. Sorkin devotes considerable space to the political and regulatory failures that allowed the speculative bubble to inflate unchecked, indirectly offering a lens through which to view more recent financial crises, from 2008 onward. The book has not been without critics, particularly from free-market circles that have taken issue with passages they consider too favorable toward state intervention in the economy, but the historical reconstruction and quality of the writing have been widely acknowledged even by those who dispute its political framing. Received as one of the season's most notable nonfiction releases, the book has been called by several outlets essential reading for understanding the distant roots of modern financial crises, and it climbed quickly up US nonfiction bestseller lists, confirming the public's enduring appetite for economic history told with narrative drive.
see full review
Alaska
In Venice, young artist Maia enters a clandestine affair with Sergio, a married fisherman much older than her. Amid recurring fantasies of a remote island and a deep friendship with Louis, who takes her in, Maia confronts the wounds of her childhood while searching for her identity as an artist.
Alaska, published by Bollati Boringhieri, is the new novel by Valentina Maini, the Bologna-based author who made her fiction debut with La mischia and quickly established herself as one of the most distinctive voices in new Italian writing. Its protagonist is Maia, a young aspiring artist who, in a Venice suspended between reality and hallucination, enters a clandestine relationship with Sergio, a married fisherman much older than her, a bond that pulls her into a vortex of desire and possible personal shipwreck. Around this forbidden love story, the novel builds a network of presences that become just as central, recurring fantasies of a mysterious, remote island that gives the book its title, and above all a deep bond with Louis, the young man who takes Maia into his eccentric Venetian apartment and gradually becomes her most stable emotional anchor, in counterpoint to her volatile passion for Sergio. Through these relationships, Maia is forced to confront the deepest wounds of her childhood, in a painful but necessary process the author stages without flinching, following her protagonist as she sinks as deeply into love as into her own mind, in a state permanently balanced between sanity and vertigo. Like La mischia before it, the novel moves in a lyrical, fragmented style characteristic of Maini's writing, weaving together different timelines and a strong introspective streak, avoiding a linear plot in favor of a progression built on images and sensations. The underlying question, made explicit by the author herself, is what it truly means to become an artist, and how the line between balance and collapse, between love and friendship, between desire and the need for protection, is in fact unstable and constantly shifting. Less geared toward the mass commercial bestseller audience than other titles of the season, Alaska has found a devoted readership among serious literary readers and a very favorable critical reception, confirming Maini as one of the most mature and closely watched Italian authors under 40. The novel appeared among the standout titles in the quality-focused ranking curated by the magazine L'Indiscreto in 2026, a recognition that certifies its literary value beyond its niche place in the publishing landscape.
see full review
The Look
Michelle Obama, together with longtime stylist Meredith Koop, traces her style evolution across more than 200 photographs, from her years in the White House to her public life afterward. A visual and written account of how clothing became, for her, a tool of communication as well as expression.
The Look, published by Crown in 2025, is the new book from Michelle Obama, co-written with Meredith Koop, the stylist who worked alongside the former first lady for much of her public life, with a foreword by art and African American culture historian Farah Jasmine Griffin. Through more than two hundred photographs and Obama's own first-person accounts, the book traces the evolution of her style from the years of her husband Barack Obama's Senate campaign, through eight years in the White House, to her public life afterward. It is not, however, a simple catalog of outfits and public appearances, the book focuses on how every stylistic choice, from the bright sheath dresses and cardigans of her first-lady years to the tailored suits, denim and braids of her post-presidential period, was always deliberate and considered, often serving a specific role in political and public communication. Alongside Obama's own voice, the book gathers contributions from those who worked daily on shaping her image, besides Koop, it features makeup artist Carl Ray and hairstylists Yene Damtew, Johnny Wright and Njeri Radway, together with several designers who dressed the former first lady for the most significant occasions of her public career. This chorus of voices allows the book to move beyond the purely aesthetic and become a broader reflection on the relationship between public image and power, particularly for a woman who was the first Black first lady in United States history and had to contend with constant media scrutiny of every detail of her appearance. The book thus joins a tradition of writing about fashion as political language, but does so from the singular vantage point of someone who lived that pressure firsthand for more than fifteen years in the spotlight. Received very positively by critics and the public, The Look debuted at the top of US nonfiction bestseller lists and won the NAACP Image Award, confirming Michelle Obama's ability, already demonstrated with the bestseller Becoming, to turn an account of her personal experience into a publishing success that appeals to fashion enthusiasts and readers of political and social nonfiction alike.
see full review
