AUGUST 2025: All That is Left of Life by Roberta Recchia: around ROME

1st August 2025

TR: Antonella Lettieri

This little book dropped unassumingly through our letter box one day. I am a sucker for appealing book covers, a family saga and virtually anything set in Rome. And what a wonderful adventure this read proved to be. It deserves a very wide readership, and I hope it does well in the UK market. It has gone straight into my top 50 and will be a future classic.

The novel opens with Marisa, daughter of Letizia and Ettore Ansaldo. She has a sister who has married into money and lives a life of relative luxury, in a large house away from the frantic heart of the city. Marisa’s story gets the bibliophile’s juices flowing. She has found herself in a bit of trouble and after various deliberations she is thrust together with Stelvio, who is clearly smitten with her and they marry. They go on to have two children and it is teenage Elisabetta (Etta)’s  story that takes the narrative forward. Given her small health issues, the family decamps to the coast every Summer, to fictional Torre Domizio to the north of Rome. And there a terrible fate befalls her.

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The focus then swings round to Miriam, who is Etta’s cousin and of similar age, as she grapples with life going forward.

What the author does extremely well is capture the nuanced behaviour within the family after a trauma, the pressures that penetrate everyday lives, thought patterns, guilt, regret – in fact, all the big emotions that mark the aftermath. It is worth flagging that there may be trigger issues for some.

This is the kind of novel one waits for, reading very good or ‘good enough’ books in the interim; then, as if by magic, an exceptional story like this comes along. As a reader one can only marvel at the gifted storytelling. And great translation.

This has future classic written all over it. And it is very disappointing to see that 4 weeks after publication – as I write this review – there are no reviews as yet on Amazon, which is always indicative that a book has not yet reached its target audience. So, readers, let’s change that!