A town that prohibits reading or the story of a girl raised in the forest who moves to London: eight titles for the Three Wise Men to get right

In this illustrated book, the renowned French author Rébecca Dautremer recovers one of her iconic characters, the rabbit Jacominus Gainsborough, to give shape to a cumulative story that is a hymn to lifelong friendships. Those relationships that start in the most unexpected way and then solidify through the accumulation of big and small memories that one remembers with more nostalgia as the years go by. Dautremer intersperses in the composition of the book beautiful realistic illustrations of the present with extraordinary almost surreal double-page drawings, illustrations that invite us to discover the memories that irremediably unite the lives of the elderly Jacominus and his friend Policarpo. A beauty.

It was not easy to overcome the impact of the first installment of 'The City Without a Name', but Faith Erin Hicks does it with 'The Heart of Stone'. In its pages, readers will meet again with the protagonists of the saga and, above all, with the fast-paced and fascinating mix of adventure and political thriller that is this capital work and that allows for very varied levels of reading. The adult audience, in fact, will not take long to find a certain parallel between the unstable Spanish political situation and the intrigues and struggles for power that take place between the members of the Dao clan and the rest of the peoples who are waiting for the opportunity to take over the power in the nameless city. As she did in the first installment, Faith Erin Hicks leaves readers with their hearts in their mouths and eager to know the outcome of the trilogy as soon as possible.

Yasmina's father has a humble job, so humble that it barely gives them enough to live on. Yasmina, however, is a girl with a natural talent for taking advantage of every last food in the kitchen that her friends from the neighborhood community garden give her. Its destruction to create a large company producing 'mutant' potatoes will jeopardize the balance of the family and will also be the starting point of this graphic novel full of action that brings readers closer, in an understandable way and without giving up to a sense of humor, complex and far-reaching current debates such as social inequalities, the power of the food industry, the genetic modification of foods or the importance of the citizen movement to end clear situations of negligence and abuse of power.

The founder and editorial director of Duomo, Luigi Spagnol, who died in 2020, and the prestigious Italian writer Pierdomenico Baccalario sign this entertaining story that takes us to an Italian summer town. In Banalia, books and the very act of reading are prohibited. Pierluigi, the main child, travels there with his parents. And there he will meet other minors who share a dubious quality with him: they do not like to read. Apparently, then, they are in the perfect town for them. But human beings are indecipherable and everything seems to indicate that, sometimes, prohibiting is the best strategy to encourage passion for something. These young people will discover this little by little in a narrative with a surprise ending full of nods to great classics of literature that perfectly mixes intrigue, humor and adventure.

The prestigious Italian author Chiara Carminati fictionalizes a real event from the Second World War to immerse the reader in a journey that takes from the Italian region of Trieste (then in dispute between Italy and Yugoslavia) to South Africa. The reader makes the journey following the steps of a 15-year-old boy determined to find h
is father alive, who disappeared 11 years earlier after the attack by a German submarine on a British ship sailing off the coast of West Africa with hundreds of Italian prisoners of war on board. The historical, adventure, and initiation and learning genres intertwine wonderfully in this brilliant and emotional novel in which a brave and intrepid teenager crosses the world to look for his father without knowing that on that journey he will end up meeting itself.

This is the story of October, a 10-year-old girl who lives alone with her father in the forest, happy and wild in her isolation from the world. When she turns 11, however, an unfortunate accident involving her father forces her to return to civilization, to exchange the freedom of the forest for a townhouse in London, the silences and sounds of nature for the noise of the big city, to living with a mother whom he has hated since she decided to abandon her wild life and, with it, also “abandon” her daughter. This clash between two apparently antagonistic and irreconcilable worlds marks this novel with a classic aroma with which Katya Balen has created a kind of literary 'Captain Fantastic', a work that, like the film starring Viggo Mortensen, is destined to leave a deep imprint on readers.

'The Sleepers' is a fabulous and addictive 'thriller' in which a dramatic event, the appearance in an open field of a completely naked young woman who finds a video on her cell phone in which she is seen naked and drugged, serves the writer Nando López to talk about rape culture, but also about the lack of scruples of the media or the social difficulty in accepting those who are different. This difficulty is suffered firsthand by the central character of this novel, a young trainee journalist, Gael, who will have to face the ghosts of his past to cover a news story in which, without intending to, he will end up being the protagonist.

An image of a small town surrounded by a kind of cloudiness that takes the shape of the profile of a woman serves as the opening to this graphic novel that recovers the myth of the Pantafa. It is a terrifying Italian legend, typical of the Abruzzo region, which refers to the spirit of a woman who wanders at night, paralyzing her victims in bed. This myth, which could have been a popular explanation for what we know today to be a sleep disorder (sleep paralysis), is masterfully narrated by Marco Taddei (Translation by Marta Tutone), immersing us in a gothic horror tale, of a horror barely hinted at. The spectacular black and white illustrations of La Came help to perfectly convey the dark and unhealthy atmosphere that surrounds the town of 'Malanotte', where the protagonist of the story returns to record his neighbors and recover the stories of a small town anchored in its legends and oblivious to the advance of modernity.