The literary conundrum to end all conundrums, an ongoing investigation for centuries now, may have a solution. Who wrote Hamlet and all the other twenty-eight plays attributed to William Shakespeare, as well as the sonnets and other odd bits? Hardly new, the question, since some suspected back in the 16th century that the theater personality William Shakespeare, actor, comedian, and impresario, collected and adapted for the stage plots conceived by others, in cultural, historical and geographical contexts different from England’s. Roman artist Mojmir Ježek, with the help of the scholar Marianna Iannaccone, has assembled persuasive new proof that behind Shakespeare’s signature lurked the celebrated English humanist of Italian origin, John Florio, a well-known lexicographer embroiled in Elizabethan court intrigues. It’s a name that can finally fling off all the slurs, omissions, and silences. This book is the story of Florio’s life, drawing on all the records and research available on John Florio, the English translator of Montaigne and friend to Giordano Bruno: the only literary figure, writes Ježek, “whom the glass slipper of the ghostwriter of the immortal works signed Shakespeare fits, and perfectly.” Afterword by Masolino D’Amico. Umberto Mojmir Ježek, journalist, illustrator, painter, and sculptor, has worked at La Repubblica as a graphic designer, cartoonist, and illustrator and is well-known for his hearts that, for thirty years now, adorn Natalia Aspesi’s column in the supplement Il Venerdì di Repubblica. In the 1980s, he brought his Madame Inquieta to the magazine Linus. Ježek made the video Apollo&Daphne reloaded, which premiered at the 2010 Rome Film Festival. In recent he’s become fascinated with the question of Shakespeare’s real identity and is developing a TV series on the subject. Marianna Iannaccone has a degree in comparative literature, with studies in Italy and London. She edits the well-documented and much-followed official John Florio website (www.resolutejohnflorio.com) and conducts various research projects on his life and work. She is the author of the book John Florio’s Italian & English sonnets (2021). Along with Saul Gerevini (shakespeareandflorio.net), Iannaccone is one of the world’s leading scholars of the humanist John Florio and the links between Shakespeare and Florio.

On Harlow Street, the well-to-do neighborhood couples and their children gather for a catered barbecue as the summer winds down; drinks continue late into the night. Everything is fabulous until the picture-perfect hostess explodes in fury because her son disobeys her. Everyone at the party hears her exquisite veneer crack – loud and clear. Soon after, that same young boy falls from his bedside window in the middle of the night. And then, his mother can only sit by her son’s hospital bed, where she refuses to speak to anyone, including her best friend who lives across the street. What follows is the unravelling of four families on this street, as they try to understand what happened that night, and what secrets are being kept between friends and neighbours, ones that connect them all in ways they don’t know. Ashley Audrain’s debut novel, The Push, was a New York Times, Sunday Times (London), and number-one international bestseller, and a Good Morning America Book Club pick. It has sold in more than forty territories, and a limited television series is currently in development. Audrain previously worked as the publicity director of Penguin Books Canada, and prior to that she worked in public relations. She lives in Toronto, where she and her partner are raising their two young children.

Dario Corbo, former crime reporter, now press officer for a wealthy arts foundation and right-hand man to its owner, Nora Beckford, has been, to all extents and purposes, dragged into some seriously dirty business this time. Someone is plotting against his captivating and glamorous boss, it would appear. A unique painting by Nora’s father, the late great sculptor Thomas Beckford, has turned up. A portrait, though he never painted portraits. It seems authentic, and she wants to get it back, out of love for her father, of course, and to snag it for her foundation. The problem is, the painting belongs to Maddalena Currè, the pretentious daughter of an art dealer in the Old Masters, scheming to infiltrate the foundation herself. Giampaolo Simi’s literary debut in 1995, Viaggiatori nella tempesta, won the Lovecraft Award, while his 1996 novel Il buio sotto la candela earned him the Nino Savarese Award. After being shortlisted twice for the Scerbanenco Award, for his novels Direttissimi altrove (1999) and Tutto o nulla (2000), Simi’s Cosa resta di noi finally won the prize in 2015. His more recent titles include La ragazza sbagliata (2017, Chianti Literary Award 2018), Come una famiglia (2018, Bancarella Award Finalist), I giorni del giudizio (2019), and Senza dirci addio (2022). This year, as well as Il cliente di riguardo (fourth in the series featuring ex-reporter Dario Corbo), Simi has brought out Sarà assente l'autore. Nel 2020, he also co-wrote, con Piera Degli Esposti, L'estate di Piera.

X spends his days smoking weed and selling rare sneakers online, until he becomes a private detective paid to crack a case. Twenty years ago, he was a famous rapper, even before hip hop climbed the charts, and with his only album he clinched the status of a cult artist, respected by the rising generation and still listened to. X himself was on the cover of that famous album, wearing a hoodie, an ‘X’ tattooed on his neck. Too bad that tattoo now appears on the neck of Aelle, the kid who was killed and is all over the news. The spitting image of X, twenty years ago. Giovanni Robertini was born in Milan in 1975. He was the editor of linus and Rolling Stone, for which he wrote pieces on rap music and interviewed all the headliners on the Italian scene. He also writes for television, working on programs such as Avere Ventanni, Le Invasioni Barbariche and Splendida Cornice. His previous novels are L'ultimo party (2013) and La solitudine di Matteo (2020). Morte di un trapper is his first work of noir fiction.

On his thirteenth case, Chen Cao, Shanghai’s former chief police inspector and now de facto ex-head of the office for the reform of the justice system, is appointed “number one consultant” to the investigation team charged with shedding light on the violent death of three individuals connected with the prestigious Renji Hospital in Shanghai. Meanwhile, the Covid-19 virus has outgrown Wuhan and is spreading out of control, and now the streets of Shanghai are crisscrossed by ambulances with their sirens wailing and neighborhood committee reps intimating residents to shelter at home. Writer, poet, and translator Qiu Xiaolong was born in Shanghai and has lived in the United States since 1989, where he was studying T.S. Eliot when the Tienanmen Square protests broke out. His support for the revolt antagonized the Chinese authorities and forced him into exile in the U.S; he teaches Chinese literature at Washington University in Saint Louis. The award-winning thirteen-part Inspector Chen Cao series has been translated into twenty languages and turned into a popular BBC Radio series. It is soon to be adapted to the small screen.

In 1941, in a Ukrainian village abandoned by the Soviet troops, von Bora meets Vladimir Propp, the scientist from Leningrad who had discovered the universal pattern of fairy tales. With this expert in folklore to help him, von Bora starts probing the murder of a witch/prostitute. In Prague in 1942, while Heydrich is planning the Final Solution for the Czech Jews, two old people in the courtyard below his window catch von Bora’s eye, during an investigation into the assassination of a collaborationist. The old teacher who reports his own son to the Nazis, in a village in occupied Russia, takes von Bora back to a family vendetta in those bloody lands. In the second part of the book, the other stories take place under the sunnier skies of occupied Italy. A crime of passion near Verona in 1943, involving a priest, a widow, and the guards of Salò. A jeweler in Littoria, killed over a brooch with a telling name: the love knot. An old man on a train, in Tuscany in 1944, who describes the murder of two lovers. A sort of family feud in the Appennines involving a shrewd resistance fighter. Born in Rome, Ben Pastor, a social sciences professor at U.S. universities for many years, has tried her hand at different genres for her fiction, with a particular focus on the classic crime novel. Of her Martin Bora series, Sellerio has published to date Il Signore delle cento ossa (2011), Lumen (2012), Il cielo di stagno (2013), Luna bugiarda (2013), La strada per Itaca (2014), Kaputt Mundi (2015), I piccoli fuochi (2016), Il morto in piazza (2017), La notte delle stelle cadenti (2018), La canzone del cavaliere (2019), La sinagoga degli zingari (2021), La Venere di Salò (2022), and La finestra sui tetti e altri racconti con Martin Bora (2023).

RAYMOND CHANDLER AWARD 2023 Born in Casablanca on December 1st, 1944 – and if you think of Humphrey Bogart’s Rick Blaine, it’s almost a sign of fate – Daniel Pennac’s roots were in Corsica and Provence, but he grew up in Africa and then Nice, where he got a degree in literature. He was a teacher for many years, and even after he won fame for his novels, much of his output had his youngsters in mind, including a celebrated comic book, Lucky Luke – Lone Riders, co-written with a master of the Mediterranean noir genre, Tonino Benacquista. Indeed, Pennac was awarded an honorary degree in pedagogy from the University of Bologna in 2013. After trying his hand at science fiction (two novels), children’s literature and essays, the genesis of the nine-novel Belleville series was almost an accident. Pennac was in Brazil, where he happened upon the mystery or hard-boiled genre and enthused about it to the point of using it to leverage his own imagination and creativity and gain access to orality and morality, becoming a great writer himself. His first time around he used a pseudonym and co-wrote a sort of spy story with his friends Jean Bernard J. B. Pouy and Patrick Raynal. Masterfully translated into Italian by Luigi Bernardi, the novel came out as Binario morto in Italy in 1997. Pouy and Raynal goaded Pennac into writing his own crime novel, claiming he couldn’t pull it off. Pennac rose to the challenge and, courtesy of Gallimard’s Série Noire, introduced his hapless investigator and his motley crew of a family to the world. They would people his novels from 1985 to the present. Another great love of Pennac’s is the theater: not only did he write plays himself, he performed his own monologues or classics like Bartleby, the Scrivener by Herman Melville, staged in Italy in 2012. Pennac also paid homage to Fellini on the centenary of the filmmaker’s birth, reading The Law of the Dreamer at the Piccolo Teatro in Milan, on January 20th, 2020. Renowned and adored by his readers for his humorous, versatile writing style, peppered with his love of paradox and hyperbole, Pennac is a virtuoso of personal and colorful prose swinging between the vernacular and a more purely literary style. He creates a world of simple folk, stock figures of his times, which he has gathered together over the years around his “little man”, Malaussène, who distills the author’s vision of the world. The stage for Pennac’s novels is the Parisian neighborhood Belleville, another great protagonist of his books since the very first. Poor, dirty, and shabby, Belleville is still a warm and bustling place, buzzing with life and humanity, teeming with Arabs, Africans, and muezzins who chant from a bathroom window, over cous cous served at all hours and unfailingly washed down with a glass of pastis. A splendid portrait of a world whose popularity Le Monde attributes to the fact that readers identify with the

Teresa never thought she’d fall head over heels for Alessandro Manzoni before she even met the man. She certainly isn’t the type to play that game: she’s a young, well-off widow with a son, a position in society, and an education that allows her to shine at the literary salons in 19th-century Milan. It follows that when Manzoni himself becomes a widower on the death of his first wife Enrichetta in childbirth, the last of many, a close friend schemes to have the two ‘meet cute’ at opening night at la Scala. Wedding bells will ring in January 1837, and the passion runs high from the very start. Marina Marazza specializes in historical themes and social customs. She contributes to various magazines, such as Io Donna. She has written novels, non-fiction, and non-fiction novels, including her most recent titles brought out by Solferino: L’ombra di Caterina (2019); Io sono la strega (2020, winner of the Salgari Award, the Asti Award, and the 2021 Selezione Bancarella Award); Miserere (2020); La moglie di Dante (2021); and Le due mogli di Manzoni (2022, Acqui Storia Award, Scritture di Lago Award, and Ippolito Nievo Award).

On the northern outskirts of Rome, dreams have the scent of money. It’s the mid-1990s. Televisions are turned on in all the small apartments in the buildings in the neighborhood, ready for the Saturday night ritual: the lottery draw. When the winning numbers are revealed, the tickets with the losing bets are tossed out, along with the scraps left on the dinner plates, and all hopes of starting over. Mario is nineteen and has grown up here in Cinisello and at the racetrack at San Siro where he bets on the horses. Things seem to take a turn for the better the moment he happens on a wacky gang that has figured out a way to rig the draws from the lottery wheel in Milan. Fausto Gimondi has always been fascinated by technology and innovation. He was a co-founder of the website virgilio.it and others that left their mark on the Internet era in Italy. Fortuna criminale is his first novel.

Serena is a successful broker. She’s the captain of her fate and answers to no one. All that changes after the fire at the chalet. Serena starts to descend into her worst possible nightmare. What if that maternal instinct she has always denied turns out to be stronger than fire or fate or anything else in the world? And what if we only realize how much we really loved someone only when that person appears to be lost forever? Donato Carrisi started writing for film and television in 1999. He wrote the screenplay for the made-for-TV movie Nassiryia – Per non dimenticare and the story and screenplay for the thriller mini-series Era mio Fratello. In 2009, he wrote his first novel, Il suggeritore [The Whisperer]; published by Longanese, it won the Bancarella Prize. His second novel, Il tribunale delle anime (2011) [The Vanished Ones], was shortlisted for the Giorgio Scerbanenco Award. It would be his 2012 novel, La donna dei fiori di carta, that attracted international attention. His 2013 novel L’ipotesi del male did win the Giorgio Scerbanenco Award. In 2017, Carrisi made his directorial debut with The Girl in the Fog, which won the David di Donatello for best debut film. The same year, his novel L’uomo del labirinto came out, and would be turned into a film, Into the Labyrinth, Carrisi’s second directorial turn, in 2019. In between the two films, he published another novel, Il gioco del suggeritore [The Whisperer’s Game, 2022], in 2018. Last year Carrisi completed his third film, Io sono l'abisso [I Am the Abyss], based on his novel of the same name, published in 2020. Eva, the protagonist of La casa delle luci, also appears in a children’s book, Eva e la sedia vuota, also published by Longanesi, with illustrations by Paolo D'Altan.