“Writing with the motion of a run-up (…) that increasingly draws you into its meandering world of sudden swerves here and there in a perfect combination of humour and drama, despair and fun, nostalgia and future.”
——Ermanno Paccagnini, Corriere della Sera, La Lettura

“A continuous, poetic stream of consciousness (…) The pain of loss, resurgence, anxiety, misery – life today in a debut novel one reads holding one’s breath.”
——Marie Claire

“A long, sustained letter to her prematurely dead mother – a sacred iconostasis and a longedfor affective presence – is the driving force of this Bildungsroman, the novel of the formative years of a traveller who only finds peace in the perennial anxiety of a Heimat, as she calls it, the hearth and home she carries in her suitcase.”
——Il Piccolo

A poignant letter written to a mother by a woman who, in turn, becomes a mother and wants to know how to go about the task. Emotively and literarily, an extremely high-temperature debut.

Set between the Versilia district of Tuscany in the 1980s and 1990s, Krakow and Berlin, Non è vero che non siamo stati felici tells the story of a muddled-up apprenticeship with a combination of rare emotive incandescence and even amused poetry. The main character seems to be leading a sort of miniature travelling circus across Europe: she has three children, Caravaggio, Gauguin and Scoiattola (Squirrel) and two animals (Hungarian hounds). There are no posters or placards, every night it’s an impromptu performance. The protagonist, who writes to her dead mother because she can’t speak to her, has the job of choosing the venue and putting up the big top. Most important of all, she has to perform the most daring piece of magic: though her heart is racked with nostalgia, she has to convince her children that the world is a nice place.

For Germans, Heimat is the place one comes from and will belong to forever. For the small family in the novel, who travel, language by language from country to country, it’s the place that’s north on their compass. Matter-of-factly, they soon realise, however, that it’s not geography that provides the answer. Heimat is the mother: there is no other place of origin, hence no other possible destination.

It's not true we weren't happy is a long letter –despairing, mad, draining, amazing, magical – to a mother who has never really died. For, one might say, a mother never dies: one thing’s for sure, it’s not fate and its puerile twists that leave us orphans.

Irene Salvatori

was born in Forte dei Marmi in 1978. A graduate in Contemporary History at the University of Pisa, she subsequently studied in Krakow and lived in Berlin. She is a translator from Polish and German and she writes poetry. She plans to move to the south of France.