For some people, time is a race that never stops. For others, slow, uncertain steps. For a few, time has stopped forever. And the history of Italy is a broken thread: a clock that has stopped in the bloody Years of Lead. In this immobility, Vera Coen and Andrea Malchiodi have immersed themselves. There’s a bond between them, over an act of violence four decades earlier: a trauma from her distant past that rewrites his own. From that moment on, everything changes for Andrea. So begins an investigation into the mists of time for the Italian Republic, hunting down the mysterious “man of the clockwork”. The tape rewinds to the early 1980s, caught between the last outbursts of armed resistance and the dawn of an age which says it is new, yet is dominated by the same old figures and their status quo.

In 2007 Maurizio De Giovanni attracted the attention of Italy’s literary scene after winning an award, thanks to a novel set in Naples in the 1930s and featuring a police commissioner, Luigi Alfredo Ricciardi: Il senso del dolore (I Will Have Vengeance), published by Fandango and republished, starting in 2012, by Einaudi, along with the entire series. Thus began his highly popular series that with the 2024 Volver, counts fifteen novels to date, plus several stories in the short story collections Giochi criminali (Einaudi, 2014), L’omicidio Carosino. Le prime indagini del commissario Ricciardi (Centoautori, 2017), and L’ultimo passo di tango (Rizzoli, 2017). The saga was turned into a popular TV series. In 2012, De Giovanni won the Scerbanenco Award for The Crocodile (Mondadori), which introduced Inspector Lojacono, co-protagonist of another hit book series as well, set in contemporary Naples: The Bastards of Pizzofalcone. This last added a new chapter in 2024: Pioggia per i bastardi di Pizzofalcone, and it also became a popular TV series starring Alessandro Gassmann and Carolina Crescentini. With a more recent novel, Sara al tramonto, De Giovanni created another character, a former secret service agent, now retired, with the gift of invisibility and a talent for stealing people’s secrets. This series of novels was also turned into a Netflix series starring Teresa Saponangelo and Claudia Gerini. There are also myriad comics and graphic novels based on the author’s works.