When Moreno Giovannoni, in his first book, The Fireflies of Autumn (2018), produced lines like ‘The Angel of Sadness draped its wings over the village and slept’, it was clear we were dealing with a writer of some poetic sensibility. Indeed, Giovannoni writes about his subjects with such care, tenderness, and gentle humour that it is possible to forget that the life he is depicting was more often than not ‘wretched’. He wrote his first book for two main reasons: to give readers the ‘flavour’ of a place and to depict the ‘travails of migrants’. These are also the reasons for his second book, The Immigrants, in many ways a companion to his first.
The Immigrants: Fabula mirabilis, or, a wonderful story by Moreno Giovannoni
Black Inc., $36.99 pb, 304 pp
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