M Son of the century

The expansive first installment of Scurati's Strega Prize--winning tetralogy, his English-language debut, covers the rise of Benito Mussolini in the aftermath of WWI. In 1919, a rally of the Fasci Italiani di Combattimento signals fascism's rise. With the war ended, Italy churns in turmoil as the troops, described by Scurati's omniscient narrator as "forty thousand loose cannons," return home. (A dramatis personae catalogues over 70 principal characters.) Sweeping statements by Mussolini ("The age of mass politics has begun") combine with a range of primary sources, including newspapers and protesters' graffiti. Scurati captures Italy's past by blurring fiction's boundary with history, such as with chapters narrated by Mussolini himself ("I am the misfit par excellence," he avows). The historical sweep takes in fascist, socialist, and liberal ideologies competing for Italy's future, and the author captivates with portrayals of various characters' poignant struggles, such as the wealthy and obstinate real-life socialist leader Giacomo Matteotti, who was abducted and murdered by Fascists on June 10, 1924. The magisterial prose, adeptly translated by Appel, takes a bold look into the abyss, as readers will come to know "the Duce of fascism" and to understand "the Mussolini cyclone." Scurati's ambivalent portrait of a powerful fascist is sure to spark much debate. (Apr.)

From Barenbaum, author of Barnes & Noble Discover pick A Bend in the Stars, Atomic Anna features a renowned nuclear scientist who is sleeping as Chernobyl melts down in 1986 and rips through time to meet her estranged daughter Molly in 1992, shot in the chest and begging her to go back and change the past (50,000-copy first printing). In Bird's Last Dance on the Starlight Pier, Evie Grace Devlin tries to leave vaudeville behind to become a nurse in 1930s Galveston, TX, but encounters setbacks and instead gets caught up in the shady world of dance marathons; following the Dublin International Literary Award long-listed Above the East China Sea (75,000-copy first printing). In Spur Award-winning Dallas's 1918 Denver-set Little Souls, sisters Helen and Lutie care for the daughter of a flu victim, and an abusive man's murder is covered up by leaving his body on the streets with all the other corpses to be collected (30,000-copy first printing). PEN/Robert W. Bingham finalist Llanos-Figueroa explores 19th-century Puerto Rican plantation society through Pola, A Woman of Endurance, captured in Africa and brought to Puerto Rico to bear babies subsequently taken from her and enslaved (40,000-copy first printing). First in a tetralogy, Scurati's internationally best-selling, Strega Award-winning M.--short for Mussolini--explores the rise of fascism in Italy (40,000-copy first printing). In The Good Left Undone, the New York Times best-selling Trigiana returns to Italy, where Matelda, the dying matriarch of a Tuscan artisan family, reveals her mother's love of the Scottish sea captain that fathered Matelda during World War II.

A brilliant, sprawling, polyvocal tale of the rise of Benito Mussolini in the immediate aftermath of World War I. "We are a populace of ex-soldiers, a humanity of survivors, of dregs." So, at the beginning of this volume--the first of a projected trilogy--thinks Mussolini, who has gathered some hundred veterans of terrible alpine battles like Caporetto ("an army of a million soldiers destroyed in a weekend") to seize state power. Mussolini, writes Scurati, shifting to third-person narration, is intelligent, kind to his friends, cruel to his enemies, and "not content with second place." He is also a master of disguising his true intentions, capable of both carrying on an affair with a Jewish lover and then aligning himself with the rising antisemitic Nazi movement in Germany. Scurati draws on a vast dramatis personae to tell Mussolini's story, among its number are Enzo Ferrari, the automaker and early ally, and Gabriele D'Annunzio, the dandy and poet whose "insatiable desire for female conquests becomes a desire for territorial expansion." But always at the center is Mussolini, who envisions that "fascism will complete the nationalization of Italians," turning them away from their attachment to towns and regions to behold the empire they are about to secure on the faraway Horn of Africa. Scurati gives Mussolini his theatrically blowhard moments ("jutting his neck out, he clenches his jaw and searches for breathable air, his already nearly bald cranium tilted up to the sky"), but he makes clear that Mussolini and his militias are deadly serious about killing their enemies--Scurati's account of the murder of socialist legislator Giacomo Matteotti may remind readers of the most brutal moments of Bernardo Bertolucci's film 1900--and acquiring absolute, uncontested power. Given the recent drift of so many parliamentary and democratic nations toward authoritarianism, Scurati's book could not be more timely, and it's a superb exercise in blending historical fact and literary imagination. A masterwork of modern Italian literature that will leave readers eager for more. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.