Meeting the author

Mario Desiati

"Malbianco"

Einaudi, 2025

Meeting with the Author

From the author of Spatriati, winner of the 2022 Strega Prize.

Secrets and silences envelop the protagonists of this story like the white blight haunts the trunks of trees. Among the Petrovicis, in fact, there have always been more hidden threads than shared truths. But the questions of the son who has lost his way, and for this reason turns to look at his own footsteps, gradually clear the fog of a patchy and reluctant family memory. If "certain ghosts can only be freed by telling them," we must first understand the past from which we come.

From the woods of Taranto to the chill of the German prison camps, Mario Desiati returns with a great novel that explores the relationship between the individual and his roots, trauma and shame, courageously interrogating our country's collective repressed memories.

Marco Petrovici is forty years old and lives in Berlin when, suddenly, one day, he begins to faint. To discover the source of his ailments and find some peace, he decides to return to Puglia, to his elderly parents, who live nestled in a forest of oaks in the Taranto countryside. Burdened by guilt for not being the son Use and Tonia hoped for, he stays at the family home to care for them, but at the same time becomes convinced that the causes of his discomfort lie in the buried memory of their strange surname. Starting from a hazy childhood memory—a slightly too familiar scoundrel playing the violin in the snow of Taranto—with the help of Aunt Ada, literature and historiography, psychotherapy, and a diary found not by chance, Marco cures the "white sickness" that oppresses his family. Breaking through reticence and constant omissions, he uncovers the secret life of his great-grandmother Addolorata, a foundling and donkey herder, and reconstructs the story of his grandfather Demetrio and his brother Vladimiro, both veterans of a war fought and endured in very different ways. Who are the Petrovicis, really? Where do they come from? And what does an ancient Yiddish lullaby, unknowingly passed down for almost a hundred years, have to do with them? This is the parable of those who look back, to their deepest origins, to live in the present and imagine a future free from the whiteness that hides the true essence of people. By recounting the frenzy and turmoil of a protagonist consumed by the history he carries within him, Mario Desiati delivers his most lyrical, restless, ambitious, and mature novel yet.

Mario Desiati is originally from Martina Franca. His books include: Vita precaria e amore eterno (Mondadori 2006, Einaudi 2023), Ternitti (Mondadori 2011, Einaudi 2023), Il libro dell'amore proibito (Mondadori 2013), Mare di zucchero (Mondadori 2014). For Einaudi he published Candore (2016 and 2021), Spatriati (2021 and 2024, winner of the 2022 Strega Prize), Malbianco (2025), and La notte dell'innocenza. Heysel 1985, memorie di una tragedia (2025).