Growing up in 1990s Russia in a family marked by poverty, substance abuse, and neglect, Kola and his sister are eventually admitted into the orphanage system. Here, Kola comes face to face with a different but equally daunting challenge – navigating an unfamiliar and sometimes hostile world haunted by the absence of his mother. The ensuing journey, which eventually culminates in the adoption by an Italian family, alternates moments of both trauma and deliverance, while asking fundamental questions about our ability to reconcile ourselves with unfathomable loss.

Harrowing yet lyrical, Nikolai Prestia’s prize-winning 2021 novel is a testament to the duality of memory in its ability to both hurt and heal, and to the transformative power of those figures, adults and peers alike, who contribute to a child’s development. Translated into English as part of a collaboration between the author and a mother-daughter translator duo, the novel serves up a wrenching glimpse into the back stories that often precede the adoption of an older child.

Author Biography

Nikolai Prestai was born in 1990 in Russia and adopted by an Italian couple at the age of eight. He currently lives in Rome. His first book, Dasvidania, won the 2022 Massarosa Prize. His forthcoming novel is entitled La coscienza delle piante.

Teresa Fiore is the Inserra Endowed Chair in Italian and Italian American Studies at Montclair State University. She is the author of Pre-Occupied Spaces: Remapping Italy’s Transnational Migrations and Colonial Legacies.

Daniela Chaudhary Fiore is a fine arts student at LaGuardia High School in New York City. An older adoptee from Colombia to the U.S., she is trilingual: her first mother tongue is Spanish, her second mother tongue is Italian, and the language she adopted is English.

Loredana Polezzi is the Alfonse M. D’Amato Chair in Italian American and Italian Studies at SUNY–Stony Brook. She is a coeditor of Transcultural Italies: Mobility, Memory, and Translation and author of Translating Travel: Contemporary Italian Travel Writing in English Translation.

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