With over 350 thousand copies sold, 'La Portalettere', Francesca Giannone's debut, published by the Nord publishing house is the best-selling novel in Italy in 2023. It is also the second best-selling book of the year. Novel winner of the 2023 Bancarella Prize and the “I love this book” prize awarded by the booksellers of the Giunti bookshops, the book is currently being translated in 19 countries. The rights were acquired by Lotus production, a company of Leone Film Group.
The plot: Salento, June 1934. In Lizzanello, a small village of a few thousand souls, a bus stops in the main square. A couple gets out: he, Carlo, is a son of the South, and is happy to be back home; she, Anna, her wife, is as beautiful as a Greek statue, but sad and worried: what life awaits her in that unknown land? Even thirty years from that day, Anna will remain for everyone “the foreigner”, the one who came from the North, the different one, who doesn't go to church, who always says what she thinks. And Anna is proud and angular, she will never bend to the unwritten laws that imprison Southern women. She will also succeed thanks to the love that binds her to her husband, a love whose strength will be painfully clear to Carlo's older brother, Antonio , who fell in love with Anna the moment he saw her. Then, in 1935, Anna does something truly revolutionary: she enters a postal competition, wins it and becomes Lizzanello's first postman. The news makes women turn up their noses and elicits derisive laughter from men. “It won't last,” someone sneers.
And instead, for over twenty years, Anna will become the invisible thread that unites the inhabitants of the town. First on foot and then by bicycle, she will deliver letters from boys to the front, postcards from emigrants, missives from secret lovers. Without wanting it – but above all without the town wanting it – the postman will change many things in Lizzanello. Anna's is the story of a woman who wanted to live her life without conditioning, but it is also the story of the Greco family and Lizzanello, from the 1930s to the 1950s, passing through a world war and the demands feminists
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