Author:
Ilaria Bernardini
Publisher
HarperCollins
Release Date:
09-09-2025
Nunzia is not twenty yet. She left Sicily and is studying classical literature in Milan. She knows Greek, just as her father dreamed she would, but he is no longer with them, having left her and her mother to run a fish shop. Maddalena is older, almost forty, and comes from a difficult background, but she managed to graduate with a degree in engineering, married Luca, a violinist from a good family, and now, from the outside, she is indistinguishable from those elegant young women she dreamed of resembling when she attended a high school populated by girls richer than her. Nunzia has been feeling strange for a while, she feels nauseous, eats less, her breasts are harder. The symptoms are confusing, but the test result is clear. She is expecting a baby. A baby she does not want. Maddalena wants a baby. It is what she wants most in the world. But the doctors have been clear, she has a zero point something chance of getting pregnant. A tiny chance that Maddalena clings to like a lifebuoy thrown to you when you are drowning. Or like the possibility of adopting a child.
But it is not that easy. Because when the call finally comes, Maddalena reads in the newspapers and sees on television appeals to a young mother who has left a newborn baby in a Cradle for Life. Her daughter, perhaps? Or whose daughter?
Alternating between Nunzia and Maddalena’s points of view, in an overwhelming, powerful, and exciting duet, Ilaria Bernardini confirms herself as one of the most important authors of her generation. “Amata” is an unforgettable book that reflects on motherhood, the contradictions of desire, the pain and complexity of choice, regret, and dreams. In a country where the female body is still and always a contested terrain, this novel tackles the right to choose with passion, humanity, and gentleness.