The Hummingbird

A second Premio Strega winner (also named Best Book of the Year by Corriere della Sera, among Italy’s oldest newspapers), from Veronesi (Quiet Chaos), one of Italy’s most beloved authors. For his whole life, Italian ophthalmologist Marco Carerra has had two passions: his belief in the importance of family and his lifelong, albeit chaste, love for Luisa. His story, told in a fluid patchwork of narratives, letters, texts, emails, and transcribed phone calls that move back and forth in time, follows his childhood as he remains oblivious of his parents’ miserable marriage, to his teen years as a gifted athlete on high alert over the safety of his deeply troubled older sister, to a young adulthood marked by his successful gamble on his own challenging marriage to Marina and his devotion to their daughter, Adele. All these pieces are on a steady collision course that challenges Marco’s frantic efforts to keep whole all that he cherishes the most.