Il mare dove non si tocca

The Sea Where You Don’t Touch is read in one breath and stays forever in the heart, along with the unique voice of the narrator, a boy with a head full of questions and a heart overflowing with stories. Fabio is six years old, two parents, and nine grandparents. Nine, because he is the only child in the Mancini family, and his real grandfather’s many siblings-lonely, impetuous, dangerously eccentric men-are competing to take him hunting, fishing, and involving him in a thousand other very unchildlike activities. So Fabio grows up without hanging out with his peers, and the first day of school will be a concentration of shocking surprises: his classmates have many toys and very few grandparents, and they amuse each other with strange games with absurd names – hide-and-seek, flag-stealing, fly-tipping. And finally, the most alarming discovery of all, a terrible curse hangs over his family: all males who reach forty without marrying go mad. His grandparents-uncles are there to witness this. Fortunately, beside him are also a taciturn but loving father, mother, grandmother, and a very wise little girl who goes around dressed as a ladybug. A chaotic family that seems invincible, until something totally unexpected happens and upsets every balance. Day after day, from elementary school through middle school, Fabio will seek the ever precarious balance between a private world populated with stories, full of adventure and animated with imagination, and the world out there, confined in a thousand oppressive rules and dominated by the law of the strongest. Amid stumbles, sudden loves and extraordinary encounters, in a rocambulistic, poetic and wacky journey of formation, Fabio will understand that oddities are our inexhaustible treasure of uniqueness, and will come to discover his own vocation as a storyteller hopelessly in love with life.
For your fish no one takes it from you.
It swims oddly, it swims randomly, but here it comes to you.
After the success of Chi manda le onde, which won the 2015 Strega Giovani Prize, Fabio Genovesi returns with a bright and colorful, funny and poetic novel, capable of alternating registers with extraordinary effectiveness and moving us from laughter to emotion in an instant.