The Hummingbird
A NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR
"The Hummingbird is a remarkable accomplishment, a true gift to the world." --Michael Cunningham
"Long considered one of Italy's leading writers, Sandro Veronesi has re-written the family saga. Ardent, gripping, and inventive to the core, it has already been hailed a classic."--Jhumpa Lahiri
"The Hummingbird is a masterly novel, a brilliantly conceived mosaic of love and tragedy."--Ian McEwan
The #1 international sensation from a master of European literature--winner of Italy's Premio Strega--a saga of a Florentine family from the 1960s to the present that brilliantly captures the power of history and the multi-faceted experience of life itself as it explores how we contend with uncontrollable forces that both buffet and buoy us.
Marco Carrera is "the hummingbird," a man with an almost supernatural ability to remain still amid the chaos of an ever-changing world. Though his life is rife with emotional challenges--suffering the death of his sister and the absence of his brother; caring for his elderly parents; raising his granddaughter when her mother, Marco's own child, is no longer capable; loving an enigmatic woman--Marco carries on with a noble stoicism that belies an intensity for living. As the years pass and the arc of his life bends, Marco finds himself filled with joy for the future as the baton passes from him to the next generation.
A beautiful and compelling journey through time told in myriad narrative styles, The Hummingbird is a story of suffering, happiness, loss, love, and hope--of a man who embodies the quiet heroism that defines daily life for countless ordinary folk. A thrilling novel about the need to look to the future with hope and live with intensity to the very end, Sandro Veronesi's masterpiece--eminently readable, rich in insight, and filled with interesting twists and revelations--is a portrait of human existence, the vicissitudes and vagaries that propel and ultimately define us
Translated from the Italian by Elena Pala
"A great novel, vibrating with life and death, happiness and pain, nostalgia and hope for the future." --Vanity Fair
"Everything that makes the novel worthwhile and engaging is here ... magnificent - moving, replete, beautiful." --The Guardian
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Sandro Veronesi is one of Italy's most acclaimed writers of literary fiction, as well as a poet, essayist, journalist, and playwright. He is the author of nine novels, including Quiet Chaos, which was translated into twenty languages and won the Premio Strega, the Prix Fémina, and the Prix Méditerranée. Veronesi is only the second author in the Premio Strega's history to win the prize twice.
--Huffington Post
Outstanding. A perturbing masterpiece. Absolute beauty in the smallest detail.
--Corriere della Serra
No other writer in Italy today can tell a story like Sandro Veronesi.
--La Stampa
Powerful and seductive.
--La Repubblica
Everything that makes the novel worthwhile and engaging is here: warmth, wit, intelligence, love, death, high seriousness, low comedy, philosophy, subtle personal relationships and the complex interior life of human beings ... magnificent - moving, replete, beautiful.
--The Guardian
The Hummingbird is a masterly novel, a brilliantly conceived mosaic of love and tragedy. Veronesi creates a thought-rich and ultimately comic meditation on human error and lost chances. It's a cabinet of curiosities and delights, packed with small wonders, strange and sudden turns, insights of great poise and unusual cultural reference points. The Hummingbird in an object lesson in authorial control. Veronesi truly knows and loves all matters of the heart.
--Ian McEwan
Somehow or other Sandro Veronesi pulls off the extraordinary feat of making you believe he is writing for your ears alone. I cannot tell you what The Hummingbird is about because that would be to betray a confidence. But I can tell you it's a mightily clever novel.--Howard Jacobson, Winner of the Booker Prize
I have known for quite some time that Sandro Veronesi was one of the most skillful and profound Italian storytellers of the past thirty years. But The Hummingbird is the decisive proof of his sensitivity, of his extraordinary strength as a writer.
--Domenico Starnone, National Book Award Finalist
A great novel, vibrating with life and death, happiness and pain, nostalgia and hope for the future.
--Vanity Fair
Instantly immersive, playfully inventive, effortlessly wise... a family saga that pays homage to the quiet heroism required by day-to-day existence.
--The Observer (London)
