Dear readers, I absolutely cannot wait to read this Italian best seller, “All That Is Left of Life,” which follows generations of a family after a teenage girl’s sordid death. Perhaps unsurprisingly it has earned comparisons to the work of Elena Ferrante, and as a Ferrantehead I am pretty much obligated to read anything about teenage Italian girls with a melodramatic undertow. Our reviewer is similarly enthusiastic; she writes that the novel’s author, Roberta Recchia, “treats all this not as tawdry fodder, but as the painful lived experience of her characters, which she excavates with an honesty and precision that counter the operatic nature of her material.” (That couldn’t have been an easy feat for the translator, Antonella Lettieri, either.) The review also isolates one of the book’s major questions, which strikes me as quite poignant: “How can family — blood, found, chosen — mitigate suffering that cannot be borne alone?” Of course, that’s part of why we read. See you next time. Like this email? We hope you’ve enjoyed this newsletter, which is made possible through subscriber support. Subscribe to The New York Times.
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