If you were here

Cairo Publishing

If you were here

A young woman dies and her husband Matteo is devastated. He begins to ask himself about their life together. Little by little he is drawn into a vortex of clues and incredible revelations, false trails and unexpected realizations. A mobile phone that continues to ring, text messages blinking at night. A secret lover? A too dear friend? A mysterious second life? A hidden illness? The past come back? Or just a man and a woman who stopped communicating and didn’t know how to bare their hearts. This is not a novel. It’s a story that bets on the impossible and transforms a narration of the unspeakable into an enthralling read. It’s a book about fear and the incapacity to love. An extreme story about the lack of courage that often afflicts our daily life. About the difficulties of living one’s life fully. Everything happens during the swift and atrocious moment of Luisa’s funeral, in that brief, empty space where time is suspended. Matteo discovers he knows nothing about his young wife and would like to go back in time at any cost. He’d like to love her, embrace her, know her, share with her and their two small daughters days of happiness. He’d like to start over and make a knot in that fragile thread. But it’s no longer possible. He can only think about starting over, this time without much preparation and with a new baggage of indefeasible truths. Terse and essential, with a knife-sharp and pitiless view, the narration runs swiftly towards its liberating finale, leaving its readers as breathless as someone who has just done a double somersault.

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