Live Sheep
Shortlisted for the Strega Prize 2007
Shortlisted for the Biblioteche di Roma Literary Prize 2007
Longlisted for Isola d'Elba - Raffaello Brignetti Prize 2007
How do you defend yourself from an excessively adult world? Simple: you invent a universe of your own, with its own rules. That is what the characters of Live Sheep do. Five female souls — little girls, adolescents, mothers — faithful to a fault to their own feelings. They live through abandonment, sickness, emotional hurricanes, after their own fashion: that is, by continually defying common sense and social conventions until they joyfully establish — never having surrendered — new models of families, love, desire, and possible ways of life. Carola Susani has crafted her most mature and courageous book, succeeding in moving and irritating us as only a great story-teller knows how to do. A writer whose ethical strength is her endless love for the variety of the human heart.