From Augias to Spalletti, the new releases in the bookstore

Here is a selection of new releases in bookstores presented this week by AdnKronos.

Simonetta Agnello Hornby returns to the bookstore with 'With Justice in Mind' published by Mondadori . The writer starts with the simplest, most direct question we ask ourselves every day: "Is what I'm doing right or wrong?" From there, we touch on justice within the family institution, phenomena of social injustice, the spectre of wars (do just wars exist?), the administration of justice, the education of children and grandchildren. Agnello Hornby looks for examples in animal life and investigates the representation of justice in popular culture, in art, in literature, in stories that contribute to creating a civil sensibility.

She remembers, investigates and of course – she, a lawyer and judge – returns to the places where, as a lawyer and judge, she has seen and practiced justice. She tells us what a popular jury does, she gives us a glimpse of the criteria by which family law moves, what happens when it is necessary to decide whether to take or leave a minor with his parents. In the background are her two islands, Sicily and England, their history, their identity, their civilization: such a wealth of cultures and experiences has matured the singular form of wisdom that nourishes, in these pages, the writing of Simonetta Agnello Hornby.

'Genocide' (Piemme) by Rula Jebreal

"After a lifetime spent questioning myself, personally and professionally, on how the world could have allowed catastrophes like the Holocaust, I found the answer among the rubble in my tormented land, thousands of kilometers away from the European extermination camps. I am writing this book because the genocide in Gaza has changed me profoundly." It is from these reflections that Rula Jebreal proposes her essay 'Genocide' published by Piemme. "It has revealed the moral and political void of a world that reduces humanity to a hierarchy of death. I write so that no one, in the future, can say that they did not know or could not have known. I write in the hope that there is still time to stop the expansion of Israel's colonial genocide throughout Palestine. I write so that the slogan 'never again' becomes a call to action. I write because, even when all seems lost, words are all that remain, and with them the moral obligation to remember and resist. I write so that my words can help prevent the genocide of Gaza from becoming a doctrine to be exported to the rest of the world, a model to be applied every time power decides to have the upper hand over reason, threatening the security and existence of humanity itself."

Between autobiography and lucid political analysis, 'Genocide' is a hard but necessary book that calls civil society and politics to their responsibilities, their faults, their convenient truths and omissions. Because, if silence is in any case a form of complicity, it is also the lever through which we all risk jumping beyond the democratic order, towards new jungles dominated by the law of the strongest.

'One divided by two. Brothers and sisters' (Feltrinelli) by Massimo Recalcati

The book ''One divided two. Brothers and sisters', written by Massimo Recalcati in bookstores with Feltrinelli, investigates first of all the conflicts and torments that characterize the relationship between brothers and sisters. The first movement that guides this relationship is not, in fact, that of brotherhood or sisterhood but that of hatred and enmity.

With the birth of a brother or a sister, our life is exposed to the plural regime of the Two, to the impossibility of being an undivided One. And the first instinctive tendency of the human is not to welcome the Two, but to reject it, to deny its existence. It cannot then be Nature - the substance of blood - that establishes a bond of brotherhood or sisterhood.

Brothers and sisters always risk open conflict, a fight without holds barred, the inexhaustible aggressiveness of an envious and jealous rivalry that seems to know no possible pacification. How then can one become brothers and sisters beyond the myth of consanguinity? How can one create a brotherhood and sisterhood that are not prey to hatred, envy or aggressive claims? Is it possible to create a discreet bond of solidarity without the pretense that everything is shared, without annulling the separate existence of the Other, without wanting at all costs to force the reality of the Two into the closed enclosure of the One?

'Music for me' (Einaudi) by Corrado Augias

Einaudi is bringing Corrado Augias's 'La musica per me' to the bookstore. By its elusive and ineffable nature, music arouses deep emotions in us. Its language is universal and yet difficult to translate into words. To explain its mystery we sometimes resort to metaphors and similes, but the truth is that its beauty, its charm and its strength transcend our language. Being able to convey the joy of music, its ability to generate such intense feelings, has been for years the human and professional challenge of a writer and journalist like Corrado Augias. A long courtship ties Augias's life to the world of music. Since adolescence, when his parents took him to a summer performance of Beethoven's Pastoral in the Basilica of Maxentius, the author felt that he was "in front of something immense and extraordinarily beautiful". Not only that: he thought that the composer "was telling us a story".

Augias continued to pursue that story throughout his life, with the regret of never having practiced music from the inside, studying it more systematically, and really learning to play an instrument. Through a self-taught passion, no less intense for that, and through his work as a journalist at Rai - the many programs on music that he hosted, the great conductors and instrumentalists that he was lucky enough to know - Augias manages to "enter the music, know the musicians, know who they were, if and how the historical period in which they lived had influenced their compositions, if from their existence it was possible to deduce something about the quality, the tone of their works". He manages to give us back the music and its protagonists in all their human and artistic beauty in a book full of stories, atmospheres and unforgettable characters.

'London, the places of power' (Solferino) by Marco Varvello

Marco Varvello, a long-time correspondent from Great Britain for Rai, signs 'London, places of power', an essay in bookstores with Solferino. After Germany, the United Kingdom is the largest European economy. It leads in spending and military power. Faced with a high-risk international scenario, the promise to get closer to the European Union could not be more crucial, even for us Italians. London rediscovers common interests and values. To understand the return of this country among the international protagonists, we need to retrace the decade that has just passed: from Brexit to the possible 'reset' towards Europe of the new Labour government, from the end of Elizabeth's long reign to King Charles' new course. And the best way to do so is to take a trip to the places where decisions that change history are made.

Each chapter is a stop in the fascinating English metropolis that explains the trends underway in the country: palaces of power such as Westminster and Downing Street to investigate the end of the Conservative era and the return of the Labour Party. Buckingham Palace to tell the story of the Windsors' turning point. The American embassy to delve into the relationship with the Trump presidency and the dilemma of positioning oneself between Washington and Brussels. Neighborhoods such as the East End, areas of great immigration and a difficult social climate, and Kentish Town, the 'new Islington' of the Labour Party.

One of the most famous faces of Rai, a long-time correspondent from London, tells the story of the places of power in London and the 'ten years that shook the Kingdom' (to paraphrase the famous report on the Bolshevik Revolution). He explains the restart phase for Great Britain both on the political and institutional front. With the new sovereign who has made his illness a sign of closeness to all his subjects, in unison with the future Queen Catherine, consort of Prince William. Because between tabloids and social networks, the royal family remains an important chapter in understanding the English enigma and explaining the new phase of British life.

'Paradise Exists…But How Much Effort' (Rizzoli) by Luciano Spalletti

Luciano Spalletti, author of 'Il paradiso esiste… Ma quanta sforza', published by Rizzoli and coach of our national team since August 2023, is one of the most complex and fascinating figures in Italian football. A man as elusive as few, capable of extraordinary tenderness, but all it takes is a mistake to sigh and the velvet becomes barbed wire. As a player or coach he has frequented the locker rooms of all categories of football. He started as a child in the youth teams of Avane, managing to reach the Allievi of Fiorentina; then he started again from the Dilettanti and climbed up to Serie A, conquered in 1997 as coach of Empoli.

From season to season, from victory to victory, he has made millions of fans shine with the quality of the game expressed by his teams. Despite himself, over the years he has found himself managing very thorny cases with some of his fabulous and stormy captains. In this book he tells his story to Giancarlo Dotto, a great decipherer of complex souls, as he had never done before.

And, while he reveals his roots, his love for the land, his loyalty to the values ​​of a world that no longer exists, "made of so much work, dignity, effort and simple things", he retraces his path. From the beginning to the masterpiece championship with Napoli in 2023 - the first since the Maradona era, a city that exploded with joy - and the tormented farewell that has been written so much. To arrive at the bench of the National team with the wonderful goal of building a new winning cycle. Paradise exists ... But how much effort is contained in the story of mister Spalletti and together with so many others; a book of worries and lightheartedness, it is an intimate portrait and at the same time a great human fresco, a manual of philosophy not only football; it is a treatise on friendship, on the fatality of losing oneself and the happiness of finding oneself again, on the need to experience impetuous emotions.

'The Silence of the Wolves' (Nord) by Cécile Baudin

After 'The Factory of Invisible Destinies', Cécile Baudin returns to the bookstore with a new disturbing historical novel: 'The Silence of the Wolves' arrives on the shelves with the Nord publishing house. France, 1835. When, on a freezing March morning, at the foot of the austere castle that houses the psychiatric hospital of Saint-Auban, the lifeless body of a young medical student working at the institute is found in the snow, everyone's thoughts cannot help but return to the bloodthirsty animal that a few decades earlier had terrorized the region, claiming dozens of victims.

But the Beast of Gévaudan now seems to be just a legend, and the lack of visible wounds on the body of the unfortunate man suggests an accidental fall and subsequent exposure. Yet the shadow of the past returns to thicken the case as soon as Marianne, the institute's nurse, finds evidence that the young man was intentionally tortured and then left to die of cold. No one would be willing to give credence to a woman's opinions, except Victor Chastel, the justice of the peace of the canton, whose dark past has earned him the reputation of a lone wolf. Having experienced first-hand what it means to find yourself alone fighting against everything and everyone, Chastel decides to trust Marianne's intuition and continues the investigation in the victim's hometown, where once again he will clash with the distrust and reticence of the local notables.

And once again it will be a woman, Constance, a witty housekeeper of a wealthy local family, who will show him the way that will lead him on the trail of a secret kept hidden for years, an injustice towards the weakest that some believed buried forever, but on which an intricate and implacable plan of revenge was hatching. Under the pretext of a gripping investigation, Baudin gives us a historical novel set in the French province at the end of the Industrial Revolution, still dominated by oppression and inequality, but in which women have stopped settling and are finally starting to become masters of their own destiny. Even at the cost of killing...

'The most pitiful sky is the empty one' (Sellerio) by Eugenio Baroncelli

Eugenio Baroncelli presents with irony and deceit 'The most pitiful sky is the empty one' published by Sellerio, a book of his that presents itself as an autobiography. He, a biographer in his past books of invented existences and a falsifier of real lives that reveal themselves in the flash of a single event, a writer of obituaries of people who never died, of reviews and of jacket flaps that exist in place of their volumes, an inventor of his own plots in novels attributed to others and vice versa, wanted not only an autobiography of the Other him ('It is to the other, to Baroncelli, that things happen'), but an autobiography of the many 'Others and their projections'.

And he carries out his task by mixing, as usual, erudition and apocrypha, very futile memories, reading experiences enclosed in a sentence, events that happened to other writers and relived on his own, micro-stories, aphorisms of wisdom stripped at the beginning of any pretense of convincing, outskirts of travel places, fleeting affections and gestures. All this in a personal style that flaunts its preference for the music of phrasing over any expressiveness, which therefore makes it almost obligatory to follow each short paragraph read with the next one to be read.

'The Governess' (Marsilio) by Csaba dalla Zorza

With Marsilio, 'The Governess' by Csaba dalla Zorza arrives on the shelves. Seen from the outside, her life shows no flaws, only the typical precision of what is decided at the table. A woman who has had it all: husband, children, a beautiful house, an enviable professional position. She has had everything that for many should bring happiness. For her sixtieth birthday she decides to give herself a gift: to follow a hidden desire, to leave what she has to go elsewhere.

Piece by piece, the woman opens her heart to those who read it, like the closet where she keeps her porcelain collection. Pieces of an existence that no one has ever known about come back to life. A confession balanced between the desire to be and the need to appear. A woman who covered her fragilities with willpower, who had to fight against the greatest thing that life could put before her: herself.

Family, the judgment of others, the fear of being inadequate were fixed points to hold on to, but also from which to slip. Until the day she understands that accepting being as you are, even when it does not correspond to the idea that others have of you, to the expectations they have, is the only way to start truly living.

'The Crack of Silence' (Salani) by Javier Castillo

'The Crepa del Silenzio' by Javier Castillo will be in bookstores with Salani starting May 13. Staten Island, 1981. Daniel Miller's bicycle is found abandoned near his home. But of the child, no trace. Thirty years later, investigative reporter Miren Triggs follows a lead that leads her to the terrifying discovery of a body with sealed lips. Together with Jim Schmoer, her former journalism professor and now more than a friend, she tries to discover what connects the two cases; in doing so, they help Ben Miller, Daniel's father, a former FBI inspector who has never given up on that heartbreaking void, to reconstruct his son's disappearance for the last time, delving into an enigma in which the echo of the past resonates in the mistakes of the present and memories become deceptions.

Only silence remains the untouchable refuge of that betrayed innocence, but Miren's instinct detects a crack to be pursued at all costs before it closes. Javier Castillo returns to hold readers hostage with a new investigation of Miren Triggs, the protagonist of The Snow Girl and The Game of the Soul. A thriller that gives no respite, in which old wounds resurface as secrets never revealed: a dark and vibrant symphony, torn apart by the painful and liberating force of the truth.