The Night Trembles

A young woman sees chance to escape her marriage in the aftermath of the devastating 1908 earthquake in Sicily and meets a boy who manages to escape from the influence of an abusive mother on the verge of madness in Reggio Calabria.

The new novel from Nadia Terranova is a follow up to her award-winning Farewell Ghosts, translated by Ann Goldstein, who also was translator of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet.

＂There is something stronger than pain, and that is habit.＂ Eleven-year-old Nicola knows this well. Each night he is tied up in the cellar by his mother, the wife of Calabria’s biggest bergamot producer. There he waits for the sun to rise, and with it a sliver of freedom. On the other side of the sea, Barbara has just arrived in Messina and plans to escape her father, who pulls her towards marriage with a man she does not love. Liberty will be granted to both, but it will come at a very high price.

On December 28th, 1908, the earth shakes. Europe’s most devastating earthquake razes Messina and Calabria, and along with it everything Nicola and Barbara have known. From the ruins, each must piece back together a life and start anew. Written in Nadia Terranova’s distinctively lyric style, The Night Trembles is a melancholic ode to human resilience and the promise of the unknown.

NADIA TERRANOVA (Messina, 1978) is the author of Gli anni al contrario (Einaudi, 2015), Casca il mondo (Mondadori, 2016) and Bruno, il bambino che imparò a volare (Orecchio Acerbo, 2012). Her first novel translated into English, Farewell Ghosts (Seven Stories, 2020) was awarded the Premio Alassio Centolibri and was a finalist for the Premio Strega.

Translator ANN GOLDSTEIN is a former editor at The New Yorker. She has translated works by, among others, Primo Levi, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Elena Ferrante, Italo Calvino, and Alessandro Baricco, and is the editor of the Complete Works of Primo Levi in English. She has been the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship and awards from the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.