Foreign rights Einaudi: Valeria Zito, valeria.zito@einaudi.it

Io sono con te. Storia di Brigitte has been voted Book of the Year at Fahrenheit 2016 (Radio 3) and has won the Premio Letterario Basilicata for fiction 2017.

“Io sono con te is one of those novels – a very precious few – that changes the reader’s insight.”
la Repubblica

“A hard, compassionate, necessary novel.”
il Messaggero

For months, two women meet every week. One has lost everything and begins to tell her story; the other one listens and decides to write that story down. She has chosen it among the countless possible ones, the way you open a door or start down a path. Because only through the eyes of each individual person can you see the world.

For months, two women meet regularly; they learn to know each other, understand each other and trust each other. One of them, Brigitte, is from the Congo; she has lost everything and begins to tell her story. The other one is named Melania; she listens and decides to write that story down. She has chosen it among the countless possible stories, the way you open a door or start down a path. Because only through the eyes of each individual person can you see the world. “I didn’t know where they were taking me. I only knew that I would never return.”

Brigitte arrives at the Termini train station one day at the end of January. She is wearing lightweight clothing; she is cold and hungry and doesn’t really know what country she’s in. She had fled hastily from the Congo and was then unloaded like a burdensome package. The train station in Rome becomes her dormitory; garbage becomes her dinner. And yet she used to be a nurse, the mother of four children and now she doesn’t even know if they are alive. When she is completely at the end of her tether, she is approached by a man. He speaks to her, scribbles an address on a paper napkin for her: the Centro Astalli, where she will find a meal, human warmth and all the help she needs. In fact, it is a new beginning, but it is also the beginning of a new odyssey. Io sono con te is a rare and essential book for many reasons: it is the story of a meeting and recognition, of an ordeal and a rebirth, the description of an Italy which is both inhospitable and welcoming, politically inadequate and full of miraculous situations and people.

Melania Mazzucco has put herself on the line on every page, as a human being and as an author, using a new, flexible style which is precise, personal, and full of restrained and explosive emotion. In Vita she had narrated the epic of Italian emigration; in Io sono con te she flips the perspective: by looking these men and women in the eye, mirroring ourselves in their stories, we cannot help but recognize the desperate energy which we all have in common, when life has swept us away and we are trying to get back on our feet.