A New York Times Best Historical Fiction Book of 2023 Through the loves and losses of a middle-class family from Calabria, this heady, atmospheric saga retraces the history of twentieth-century Italy. As a young man in the Seventies, Valentino leaves home in search of a better life. With age, he begins to feel an intense regret, a longing for the world and the people he left behind, which he might not be able to recover, even after returning.     Set in Magna Graecia, the sun-drenched land where ancient Greeks stopped in their travels and happily settled, now full of ruins, South takes us back to a time when notaries and lawyers were undiscussed authorities in small towns. Meet the Notaio, his lover Magda, a Polish countess and a spy, and delve into their love story in Naples; meet the Farmacista, owner of the first chemist’s shop in town, his wife Lea, and their children; follow the paths where these lives cross, and Tamara, Mara for short, marries into the Notaio’s family; get to know charming Uncle Giorgio, an extravagant loner, owner of two small Gauguins, and Gioacchino, the house ghost.     Servants, drivers, peasants fully devoted and bound to their masters enliven this tale of love and loss, war and peace, politics and power, told in an elegant, affecting prose that transports us through time and space. “[An] archly observed novel…playful, kaleidoscopic…wonderfully eccentric minor characters—chauffeurs, nursemaids, household servants—vie for center stage with the equally eccentric bourgeois clans that employ them…it’s ‘like a page out of Proust but without any aristocrats.’” — New York Times Book Review “[An] exuberant, dizzying family saga…[a] wild ride through twentieth-century Italy, both political and personal.” — Booklist “A sweeping story of family, community, and country, South is a saga in the truest sense of the word. In lush, enthralling, often funny prose, Fortunato beautifully captures both the great dramas and small poignancies that make up a life.” —Francesca Giacco, author of Six Days in Rome “Gorgeous, sensual, seductive, and magnetic…a journey through time, history, space, passions.” — Giornale di Brescia “[Fortunato’s] most beautiful book…a family saga with all the nuances of love and pain.” — Convenzionali Praise for Mario Fortunato: “As I read Fortunato’s writing, I have the impression of being faced with that kind of writer, rare in Italian literature, who, despite starting from a poetic state of mind, nevertheless manages to be a storyteller.” —Alberto Moravia   “Mario Fortunato is a natural storyteller.” —Doris Lessing Mario Fortunato was born in Cirò, Calabria, Italy. For three decades he worked as a literary critic for the Italian current affairs magazine L’Espresso . More recently he has worked as a columnist for the German daily paper Süddeutsche Zeitung . He has also served as director of the Italian Cultural Institute in London. In addition to writing novels such as South (Other Press, 2023), a New York Times Best Historical Fiction Book of the Year, he has translated into Italian works by Evelyn Waugh, Virginia Woolf, and Henry James. Julia MacGibbon has translated works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, including Marta Barone’s Sunken City . She lives near Rome. Prologue   Where are they all? Tamara, whom only her husband called Mara, the Lawyer, with his sidekicks Rosa and Cicia, Maria-la-pioggia (“Maria-the-rain,” heaven knows why) and Maria del Nilo (heaven knows why)? Where are the old Notary, with his accidental offspring, and the old Pharmacist, who kept a violin hidden in his wardrobe? And their wives, who were so very different—one shy and gloomy, the other brusque and decisive—and yet both as tiny as children. Where are they? And Peppo from the posthouse, and Nina, who loved ghosts, Emilio, who didn’t start talking until he was twenty, Ciccio Bombarda, the chauffeur without a driving license, and Luigi, known as “Sciammerga,” with Gemma his wife, Virginia his lover, and the others who never had names. Where are those who belonged to the past historic—up in the hills, cool breezy summers, paths lined with hawthorn, like a page out of Proust but without any aristocrats—just farmers, the huddled masses, and a scattering of bourgeoisie? And those who inhabited tenses less remote—on the coast, by the sea, all of it humid and smelling of fish: a noisier penury that in the space of a few years would transform itself into ’ ndrangheta ? Where are they all? They once populated the recesses of his dreams. By night he had seen them file by like paper figurines: he had watched them mutate from shadows into bodies and from bodies into statues, and every statue was a story. By day, though, they disappeared into that patchy, inconclusive fog of which memory is made—faces crumbled, words stole away—and he didn’t try to stop them or batten them down. Valentino left at the end of the seventh decade of the twentieth century. He was