The book
Diego is a forty-something car salesman with a talent for telling half-truths. Fausto sells watches over the phone. Claudio manages (barely) his family-owned neighborhood supermarket. The characteristic common to each of these three men is their abject mediocrity. Yet, mediocrity being the mother of outrageous invention, they embark on a project that would be too ambitious in scope for any single one of them, let alone all three together. They decide to flee the city and to open a rustic holiday farmhouse in the Italian countryside outside Naples. Things would have been challenging enough for these three unlikely entrepreneurs, but when a local mobster arrives and demands they pay him protection money things go from bad to worse. Now their ordinary (if wrongheaded) attempt to run a small business in an area that organized crime syndicates consider their own becomes a quixotic act of defiance.
The author
Fabio Bartolomei
Fabio Bartolomei was born and lives in Rome. He’s a writer, a screenwriter, and a teacher of creative writing. His debut novel was Alfa Romeo 1300 and Other Miracles (Europa, 2012) and with We Are Family, his second novel, he won the Elle Magazine Readers’ Grand Prize.