The Night Still Scares You

In Milan, just after the unification of Italy, the cat Aida obsessively contemplates the stars and perceives dark omens; she is not able to give them a sense, but she feels that the skein of her existence has just begun to unravel: after her death, her soul embarks a journey that will cross continents and a century of history, with the constant of the peach-colored cage of her being a woman.

This is how we will meet Mabel who, in the Victorian London, chases an ideal of beauty that merges with sacrifice; the young Lian who, in the fatigue of the rice fields, will be forced to modify her body according the dictates of the Chinese culture; the prostitute Madeleine who opposes male abuse of power, in the Paris of the 1920s; the little Fenan who is injured and abused in that part of Africa occupied by Italian fascist in 1936; Amy who meets her true self in the McCarthyist America of the 1950s; and finally Carmen, the strong-willed Napolitan who, during the protests of 1968, wonders if the price to pay in order to be loved isn’t ultimately the renunciation of oneself and one’s dreams.

The Night Still Scares You, Fosca Navarra's debut novel, enchants for the skill with which she handles words: her fresh voice, but still full of surprising classical melodies, immerses the reader in the lives of the seven protagonists who, despite belonging to different and distant lands and eras, find each other in an individual and collective memory: they experience the burden of being a woman which has been attempted to be domesticated, through every means and since the world began, because otherwise potentially free, disruptive and dangerous.