Premio Internazionale Molinello 2014

“Eva comes out as an authentic literary heroin.”
la Repubblica

“A defense of freedom… a wonderful, fundamental novel.”
La Vanguardia

A daughter and her two fathers: a normal family. A wish fulfilled and a broken dream. The courage and tenderness to disarm prejudices.
There’s a little girl riding the Milan-Rome train – alone and on the run after a violent quarrel with her classmates. Eva is a proud girl who reads a lot of books and has a gift for telling stories. She’s only eleven years old, but already knows pain and abandonment. Giose is an instinctive man, exuberant and affectionate to a fault. He was a rising star in the punk-rock scene of the 1980s, then fell in love with Christian, a young Latin professor. Eva is their daughter. To have her they had to go to Armenia, where Eva was born. Theirs was a happy family, but it started to break apart with the sudden death of Christian.
The former musician was deemed to be an unsuitable guardian, so he is holing up in a farmhouse in the Apennine Mountains. Eva was entrusted to her uncle and moved to Milan. She hasn’t seen him for some time, but Giose is the first and only person Eva thinks of when she flees from a frightening reality. Almost miraculously she manages to find him, and they leave together on a trip through Italy in which she discovers a lot about herself, about her two fathers, the feelings that unite people beyond roles and laws, and the wonderful story to which she owes her life.
You Are How You Are is dramatic and entertaining, as fast-paced as an adventure novel. With grace, tenderness and emotional depth, it tells the story of love between a father and a daughter, a love at once utterly unique and universal, with which each of us can identify.

“He told her the truth, this morning, as soon as they woke up, groggy from the heat and wrapped in the blankets of the sofa-bed. One day he’ll bring her to Armenia. But not today – or even tomorrow. When they get back together and she’ll be able to travel with him. They won’t take the plane, they’ll go by car. Cross the Adriatic, Greece and Asia Minor, over borders, riding along the Black Sea’s stark coast, past the green tea plantations and the abandoned rusted factories of Georgia, and they’ll climb the mountains, and the time it takes to close the distance that separates them from Yerevan will make her understand just how much she was wanted, dreamed of, and sought – to the ends of the world.”