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Cover of The Twenty Days Of Turin: A Novel

The Twenty Days Of Turin: A Novel

by Giorgio De Maria, translated by Ramon Glazov

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An NPR Best Book of the Year Written during the height of the 1970s Italian domestic terror, a cult novel, with distinct echoes of Lovecraft and Borges, makes its English-language debut. In the spare wing of a church-run sanatorium, some zealous youths create "the Library," a space where lonely citizens can read one another’s personal diaries and connect with like-minded souls in "dialogues across the ether." But when their scribblings devolve into the ugliest confessions of the macabre, the Library’s users learn too late that a malicious force has consumed their privacy and their sanity. As the city of Turin suffers a twenty-day "phenomenon of collective psychosis" culminating in nightly massacres that hundreds of witnesses cannot explain, the Library is shut down and erased from history.…

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NPR Books We Love
"Giorgio De Maria’s cult novel was published in Italy in 1977, at a time when the country was wracked by constant terror attacks and consequent police state crackdowns and violence. Neighbors distrusted each other. The social and political fabric was unraveling. They called it the “Years Of Lead,” and it was the inspiration for The Twenty Days – a spooky, strange piece of magical realism that captures, nearly note for note, the turmoil and chaos of a community whose center has shattered but is being held together by a willful, communal rejection of the breakage. It’s an odd book to be reading at this point in history, but one that is almost spookily prescient of our current time and place."
NPR Books We Love — 2017 · apps.npr.org