GJune is the month that precedes the holidays. The days are getting longer, the pace slows down slightly, and it’s the perfect month for books capable of accompanying short trips and evenings with the windows openbut also to leave behind a question, an image, an anxiety to reflect on. This selection of six titles spans very different eras, countries and sensibilities, yet has a common thread: it tells of characters in the balancemen and women forced to redefine themselves in the face of a change, a loss, a desire that they can no longer ignore.
There is a woman who comes to the United States with the cumbersome weight of her Soviet origins and a hunger for life that drags her into unlikely relationships. In Rome in 1936, where Cinecittà is being born, Filomena Pancaldi, a girl from Quadraro, dreams of cinema while the regime is turning it into a propaganda tool.
Then there are real and symbolic houses that become places of transformation: there are those who keep a rain museum, those who rediscover lost emotions thanks to a robot dog, those who are chased by an old sense of guilt. Among the books to read in June 2026 there is also a news story that shook Italy in the late 70s and the folds of a sentimental separation told by Romana Petri with ferocious lucidity, digging into the most contradictory mechanisms of love.
In the end, the silence of an Australian conventwhere a woman suddenly decides to leave everything. But beneath the quiet of the rituals, memories, tensions and even thriller shadows emerge.
A book that contains the originality, the provocative, cultured and rebellious spirit of Dovlatov, Russian author who emigrated to New York. Marusja Tatarova, the protagonist, bears all the traits: daughter of two prominent people in the Russian nomenklatura, she comes to the USA more by adventure than necessity, where she lives between unlikely loves and imaginative jobs. The reader is given a picture of the American life of Russian emigrants, who have a dedicated neighborhood in New York. Upon its first publication, in the 1990s, the novel welcomed the author among the greats of the 20th century. The style entertains and inevitably makes you think.
LAWS: Foreigner by Sergej Dovlatov, Sellerio, 264 pages, €12
The girl from Cinecittà by Silvia Cinelli
Filomena Pancaldi was born in Quadraro, a village south of Romethe father is a trafficker who will end up in prison, the mother is a solid Ciociara who rattles off peasant wisdom and disenchantment. She has a passion for cinema and Cinecittà is being born nearby, the Hollywood on the Tiber which will re-establish the Italian film industry. We are in 1936, Mussolini himself blesses the undertaking, he knows how much films can exalt the glory of power. Beautiful like many, while everything collapses Filomena he will have to choose whether to be dazzled by the “dream factory” or respect its principles. A dive into the origins of Italian cinema, a pleasant and agile read, with tasty (documented) appearances by stars of the time
LAWS: The girl from Cinecittà by Silvia Cinelli, Rizzoli, 384 pages, €18
The season of empty houses by Francesca Scotti
What is a house? It is a place of affection. It’s identity. It’s the best shelterat any latitude. In these stories Francesca Scotti opens a small crack in the lives of the protagonists, who change, for better or for worse, in search of a new dimension. Yuki finds himself the custodian of a surreal rain museum, on the fourth floor of the building where he lives. Shion, who spiritually reclaims homes for a living, experiences her lost feelings again thanks to a robot dog. And Adelmo, a guest in a residence for the elderly, is troubled by the call of a canary, or rather by an ancient sense of guilt. Sixteen minimal stories, written with controlled elegance and set between Italy and Japan, the writer’s second country.
LAWS: The season of houses empty by Francesca Scotti, Hacca, 176 pages, €18
Lead and milk by Luca Mastrantonio
The “lead” of the title is that of the bullet that hit the young Dirk Hamer on 17 August 1978 on a boat near the island of Cavalloin Corsica, causing his death after an ordeal of 111 days. And the “milk” is what Dirk’s parents gave him to drink, secretly from the doctors, in the hospital. Lead and milk However, they are symbols of a story that goes far beyond this murder for which 13 years later the alleged culprit Vittorio Emanuele of Savoy was acquitted. He finds himself among the victims of the magical thinking of the “New Germanic Medicine” founded by Doctor Hamer, father of Dirk, in contrast to traditional treatments. And it ends up involving us all in a spiral of questions about the origin of diseases, about the victims who become executioners, about our hopes.
LAWS: Lead and milk by Luca Mastrantonio, Piemme, 400 pages, €20
Romana Petri safe distance
New episode of the Portuguese saga for Romana Petri, which aims at the center of family ties and tells us about the end of a love story. We start from the finale, from the separation hearing in which Luciana and Vasco will have to see each other again, perhaps to pretend that they didn’t once know everything about each other. After being abandoned, she continues a full life during the day, but at night she cannot escape the torment of questions. He, however, left Rome with her to return to Lisbon and an unresolved tangle of ties, from which she had tried to distance him. Perhaps we would label this story a toxic relationship, but every love story, in reality, has its own reasons, unexpected reconstructions, which are masterfully pursued by the author, with a sharp pen and accustomed to the human psyche.
LAWS: Safety distance by Romana Petri, Neri Pozza, 350 pages, €20
Devotion by Charlotte Wood
In the footsteps of a middle-aged woman who suddenly leaves work and family to take refuge in a small convent in rural Australiawe enter inner places that reflect parts of all of us. The narrator does not make this unexpected turn out of a call of faith, however, her life needs a greater meaning, and she feels that to find it she must immerse herself in the hours marked by rituals and prayer. In fact, from this pacified surface, past events, timeless needs come to the surface, which are intertwined with present events and traces of crime stories. Powerful and precise writing, which nominated Wood for the 2024 Booker Prize.