Welcome to Litsy!

The Island of Capri, August 1939. Italy in the grip of Fascism, the Second World War looming. At a dazzling party under the stars mingling aristocrats, Nazi officers and American millionaires, the writer, ladies’ man and Fascist loose cannon, Curzio Malaparte (1898-1957) – at that time internationally renowned – is accosted by Mussolini's secret police: someone has accused him of murder, the killing of a young English girl, a poet, who had mysteriously fallen from a cliff a few years before – a fall that actually did happen. Malaparte decides to go on the run: helped by a few trusted friends (a spendthrift prince, a Camorra man, an eccentric painter and his inseparable dog Febo) he finds himself embroiled in an impossible investigation. Who's trying to frame him? Could it be that SS officer shadowed by his bloodthirsty Doberman? And what has the terrible (and true) secret hidden in Adolf Hitler’s past to do with the plot against him? Struggling to stay a step ahead of the nightmare that's bearing down on him, the writer is forced to live by his wits, depending on a charming girl with unsuspected talents and the providential assistance of an American journalist, the perfect gentleman, destined to head US military intelligence in Europe. The setting: Capri's landscapes and the house Malaparte is building atop one of the island's most spectacular cliffs. All the while, champagne corks pop, the band plays on, and Europe's high society drifts helplessly to its doom. But Malaparte won't play that game: no passive victim, he's determined to save his skin, like his mind, still painfully scarred by a war hero’s wounds from over two decades before. Yet that's by no means all there is to it. Readers will soon find themselves up against far more than a mere literary fiction: the tale Malaparte is telling covers his entire past life; more than just a novel, he’s responding to the challenge of a lifetime. Only at the very end shall we know if he has lived up to it, or failed. Launching Monaldi & Sorti’s new masterwork. A FIRST IN ITALY, A FIRST WORLDWIDE