RIGHTS

16 vitamins

The crisp and sparkling debut of a 24-year-old who knows how to write. The style draws you in, and the things he has to say keep you there

News

A persuasive, funny, explosive, promising coming-of-age novel

Liberazione

Shortlisted for the Pier Vittorio Tondelli Prize 2006

A 26-year-old sales rep for life-size Santa Clauses, Nice (pronounced as in Nietzsche) is riding a train to Milan, where a publisher and an unlikely A&R guy are waiting for him. He has just stolen a manuscript from his father - a former nationally known writer who has been living as a recluse for years - which might just turn the whole family's life around. Meanwhile, Sàimo, Nice's cousin and the saxophone player in a rock band that can only play Springsteen's "Born to Run", has handed him a breakthrough recording that is supposed to propel them onto the illegal rave scene. 16 Vitamins is not only a wildly imaginative polyphonic novel, a linguistic tour de force, and indisputable proof of its author's enormous talent. It is also an elegy for youth in early-21st-century Italy, in a rural region, where traditional ballroom dance mixes with techno music and lambrusco wine with ecstasy pills, but coming-of-age rituals are as luminous and painful as ever.

Ivano Bariani was born in Reggio Emilia in 1981. He is the editor of the web literary magazine www.famlibri.it. This is his first novel.