Meet the Author Valeria Montebello: Interview and Book Signing

Azzurra is twenty-seven years old and her love life resembles a crime scene. She hosts a podcast called Post Love: she talks about the decline of romance, the age when it became popular to send unsolicited pictures of one's genitals. As an investigator, she spends her days scrolling through profiles on dating apps and her nights having sex with unlikely characters. With a certain amount of disenchantment, she has already collected a number of stories with a sealed fate. ‘Little larvae’, as she calls them, waiting to turn into ghosts and disappear. Her relationship with Charles, as fascinating as it is elusive, is at the ‘little larva’ stage. It all started five years earlier at Cambridge University, where Azzurra arrives for an Erasmus with her lifelong friend, Alba. Both of them are ready to shake off the provinces and discover a world of poetry classes and intellectual ambitions but, above all, of parties and boys. The two meet Carlo and Luke. Soon the four of them start dating and a complex bond is immediately formed. Azzurra, the ambiguous epicentre of the quartet, will bring things to a head and the result will be the beginning of a love affair and the end of a friendship, the one with Alba. Years later, Azzurra is a different person, yet she has never stopped thinking about her friend. To mend, however, she must first get rid of the tangle of toxic relationships that undermine her serenity. Through a frank and magnetic narrative voice, at the crossroads between a dark version of Bridget Jones and the protagonist of the cult series Fleabag, Valeria Montebello composes a fresco on contemporary dysfunctionality: the novel-manifesto of an entire generation, that of the millennials. ‘The umpteenth photo posted at three in the morning desperate for attention was testimony to my total failure: as a woman, as a lover, as a feminist.’