Devotion

Reviews

Fidelity thrilled me (I read it in one sitting), made me think, and moved me deeply. It manages to be as deep as any literature, and as irresistible as any gossip. It is a brilliant work by a brilliant writer. The book about infidelity that has shaken up Italy. Missiroli's erotically charged novel is currently being made into a Netflix series, but this intimate and ultimately moving analysis of desire and the long-term legacy of betrayal deserves to be read - moving seamlessly between perspectives, we're brought up close to the lives of its sympathetically imagined characters in a way that's completely absorbing. An absolute scorcher... Clever structured with characters criss-crossing through one another's lives and the streets of Milan, with the second half of the book taking place nine years later, Fidelity teems with pain and pleasure, blood, sweat, and semen... Its descriptions of gory fight scenes between both dogs and men pulse with a kind of brutal machismo I'm not sure you'd find in an English novel today... Read Fidelity before the end of the year. Books are almost always better than their TV adaptations. A gripping novel exploring the tensions in an apparently idyllic marriage, where a couple in their thirties is tested by their attraction to others, and by their own accumulation of desires and disappointments. A must-read... Marco Missiroli, with intelligence and empathy, considers how and why such people might find themselves wandering beyond the boundaries of promises they have made... This subtle novel has been lauded as a revealing study in marital infidelity, but it also moves beyond the theme of fidelity in traditional marriage to explore different kinds of sexual fidelity. And it touches on more abstract notions of loyalty and betrayal, including the idea of faithfulness to a family, an idea, a place, or a sense of one's true self. A writer of pure excellence. Missiroli cuts right through to the darkness of our inner lives. Powerful, delicate, exquisite. Masterful: Missiroli's words are fire... The ending - chilling - is just as good as that of Joyce's The Dead. You'll feel like taking refuge in the pages of this book and never leaving its confines. With all-encompassing writing, Marco Missiroli opens the rooms of his characters and the streets of Milan, the thoughts and the concealed desires, makes dialogue and silences reverberate with the spontaneity of great narrators. Expand reviews