Published by Bompiani in January 2021
For rights information, contact the MalaTesta Literary Agency info@agenziamalatesta.com
Over 150.000 copies sold to date
Rights sold in 21 countries
Winner of the Campiello Prize
Winner of the Strega Off Prize (voted for by the public and select magazines)
Finalist for the Strega Prize
“In a visionary and original novel, so literary and lush in its prose, the protagonist Gaia, while facing tragedies and separations, experiences a ferocious determinism that falls upon her and seems to deny any possibility of redemption.”
—Corriere della sera (La Lettura)
“In The Lake’s Water is Never Sweet, a bestseller in Italy, Caminito writes about first friendships and first loves, money troubles, family arguments, betrayals - without resorting to ordinary clichés of the ‘dolce vita’. Caminito’s narrative voice is direct, raw, cold, but never distant. This book won’t let anyone ever get away - like the lake of Bracciano.”
—Der Spiegel
Synopsis
This is the story of a working-class family dominated by a fierce mother figure, forced to leave Rome and find a new home in a social housing project in a small town built on an ancient lake and a forgotten city. Gaia, the daughter, spends her youth in this hostile town, facing a world that has nothing to offer her, and will never accept her. Here, she will find love and friendship, but without ever truly embracing them, feeling the weight of expectations, betrayal, jealousy, and loneliness. From a life spent striving to be no less than anyone else, with a mother who adamantly pressures her to chase after an impossible redemption. As time passes, Gaia finds it increasingly difficult to make the best of a bad situation. While her mother makes every effort to bear the weight of a wall about to collapse, Gaia wants to break it down and smash it into thousands of pieces that can cause harm, even to her.
In the background, there is the lake, the legends that surround it, the mysterious town that allegedly lies at the bottom, and the nativity scene that can be seen from the surface; these all linger, destined to remain in the reader’s heart alongside the protagonist, Gaia, whose compelling voice, along with her progressively violent retaliation to the walls that constrain her exposes the life of those who still struggle with the most basic human needs today, forced to live a humiliating existence. Caminito captures the contemporary reality of those at the bottom of society; from the mother’s obstinate hope of staying afloat in the midst of injustice, to the daughter’s surrender into resentment, uncovering the cheap illusions of emancipation, the broken promises of culture, and the mirage of education as an escape from barriers of class.
Giulia Caminito was born in 1988 and lives in Rome. Her first novel La grande A (Giunti, 2016) won the Bagutta Prize, Berto Prize and the Brancati Giovani Prize. She writes novels, short stories and children’s books. She published with Giunti the novel I delitti di Monteverde. La prima indagine di Gerarda Greco and with Bompiani Un giorno verrà, which has been translated into German and French. She writes for magazines and newspapers and has also worked in publishing.