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by Melania G. Mazzucco, Virginia Jewiss (translator)
It's Christmas Eve and twenty-seven-year-old Manuela Paris is returning home to a seaside town outside Rome. Years ago, she left to become a soldier. Then, Manuela was fleeing an unhappy, rebellious adolescence; with anger, determination, and sacrifice she painstakingly built the life she dreamed of as a platoon commander in the Afghan desert.
Now, she's fleeing something else entirely: the memory of a bloody attack that left her seriously injured. Her wounds have plunged her into in a very different and no less insidious war: against flashbacks, disillusionment, pain, and victimhood.
Numb and adrift, she is startled to life by an encounter with a mysterious stranger, a man without a past who is, like her, suspended in his own private limbo of expectation and hope. Their relationship - confusing, invigorating - forces her to confront her past and the secrets she, and those closest to her, are hiding.
In chapters that toggle between Manuela at home, grappling with her new life, and Manuela in Afghanistan, coming to terms with her role as a leader of fighting men and a peacemaker in a country that doesn't seem to want her help, Melania G. Mazzucco limns a story of love and loss, death and resistance in terms both surprising and cathartic. Limbo asks its readers, no less than its protagonist, what it means to be a daughter, a sister, a woman, a citizen, a soldier - or, more simply, a human.
"Starred Review. Mazzucco's finely drawn portraits of soldiers are excellent, but her aim is broader: a love story for rational people, providing complex answers to universal questions about recovering from trauma." - Publishers Weekly
"With exceptional writing and a masterly grasp of storytelling, Mazzucco offers such a realistic portrayal of the war in Afghanistan and its aftermath that you would bet he was actually there, living through it all. An excellent translation, too." - Library Journal
"An important addition to 21st-century war literature, if a flawed one." - Kirkus
"Mazzucco's novels are always something separate from their 'plots.' They are life itself, life that spreads itself impetuously." - Alberto Asor Rosa, La Repubblica
"Limbo must be read (its masterful and precise language, its delightful dialogue aside) because the book offers a great deal of food for thought: on what we are and how we tackle our own existence in this world." - L'Espresso
This information about Limbo was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Melania G. Mazzucco has written nine novels, including Vita (FSG, 2005), which was awarded the prestigious Strega Prize and named a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice. For Limbo, she was awarded the Premio Elsa Morante and the Premio Bottari Lattes Grinzane. Her many other honors include receiving the Viareggio Tobino Literary Award in 2011 (as writer of the year), the Premio Vittorio De Sica for fiction in 2012 and the Premio Ignazio Silone in 2013. She lives in Rome, Italy.
Virginia Jewiss received her Ph.D. in Italian literature from Yale University, where she is currently Lecturer in the Humanities. Her translations include Roberto Saviano's Gomorrah (FSG, 2007) and screenplays by Paolo Sorrentino, Matteo Garrone, and Gabriele Salvatores.
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