Live Bait - A Novel

Fiorenzo’s life is full of fishing, biking, and rock n’ roll—until tragedy turns his small Italian town upside down—in this tender, funny, and cinematic novel for fans of Elena Ferrante.

Muglione. Nothing grows in this Tuscan backwater except the wild imagination of Fiorenzo, a nineteen-year-old metalhead. He lives for his garage band, horror movies, and fishing in the murky irrigation ditches outside of town. But when his path crosses with Mirko, the teenage cycling phenomenon, and Tiziana, the smart but frustrated head of the local youth center turned refuge for the town's hard-drinking seniors, his world will never be the same. From the brink of despair they fight their way back through honesty, resilience, and laughter, their fates interweaving in a story that is at once achingly funny, bitter, and full of poetic fervor.

Told with the tenderness of a Fellini film, this contemporary novel continues the great tradition of Italian literature and cinema.