Italian Narrative
Lidia is twenty-three years old, has an important audition to face and many sleepless nights: those spent in front of the mirror looking at herself without recognising herself. She is one of the most talented cellists at the Palermo Conservatory, but for some time she has felt inside a wrong body. Yet that is the Lidia that her parents have raised and that Dalila loves. Dalila who looks like the fairy princess, her pianist girlfriend, with whom she will face the test that could take them to Berlin. Perhaps. Because when another opportunity presents itself, that of embarking on a path of transition, even the greatest of career dreams seems to pale in the face of the hope of finally being able to feel themselves. Several kilometres away, in Prague, Leo lives among motel rooms and nightclubs, dragging behind him a sense of loneliness and defeat, until one particularly desperate evening when he meets Selene, a salvific and fatal drag queen, as dual as the soul of the city they live in. As their poised lives intertwine, Leo will come to wonder if she has helped him only to bring him with more certainty to ruin. In the fullness and emptiness of Lidia and Leo’s stories, which mirror and chase each other across years and distances, Martino Giordano injects a powerful mixture of ferocity, misery, pity and indulgence. His debut novel digs deep, exploring the geography of two cities full of contrasts and invaded by music, in which an unequal struggle is staged: that against oneself.
Source synopsis: solferinolibri.it
Data pubblicazione: 21 febbraio 2025
Martino Giordano (Palermo, 4 December 1997) is a young writer and emerging voice of Italian queer literature. He graduated in Literature in Palermo, lived in Prague for a year and graduated from the Holden School in Turin, where he currently lives and pursues a Master’s degree in Comparative Literature . In 2017, he embarked on a path of transition as a non-binary person.
He appeared in the anthology Quasi di nascosto (Accento, 2023) among the talents under 25, contributing the short story “Don’t become a woman”, in which he addressed the experience of different trans identities.
His first novel, Variations on a Theme (Solferino, 2025), intertwines the stories of Lidia (a cellist in Palermo in transition) and Leo (a young man in Prague in crisis and struggling with loneliness). The book intensely explores the themes of identity, gender, inner conflict and the search for self through contrasting environments such as Palermo and Prague.
