Favourite

I'm sorry, your mother has been killed. With these words begins Fila's odyssey between the living and the dead: from Switzerland, where she grew up, to Italy, which her grandmother left as a young woman and where her mother has disappeared. Fila traces the paths of the two women, accompanied by the figures she encounters along the way: revolutionary Amazons, fascist deserters, and the spirit of a young peasant woman with a slit throat. The road trip in search of her mysterious mother leads her to the presumed murderer – and right into the heart of the circle that controls the country. Fila is trapped. But she is not alone. This Italian journey rushes through cities and forests, through solitude and celebration into the depths of our time: Favorita is a literary revenge thriller with a quirky sense of humor that playfully addresses questions of identity, belonging, sexual desire, and patriarchal violence. What a primal narrative flow, what a new, dreamlike tone! A young woman digs deep along her female lineage, searching for the story of her mother and grandmother, and she finds, among all the dead and spirits and amidst all the guilt and shame, their forgotten sister, beauty! A ghostly dance through Italy, painted as wild and beautiful as only Michelle Steinbeck can.