Synopsis

Rome, Caffarella Park. Guido, a detective specializing in lost-and-found items, receives a brief, anonymous message: "Please find my watch. It is priceless. And so will your reward be." Thus begins "The Alabama Lama," the debut novel by Nicolò Cavallaro, whose imaginative writing skillfully interweaves emotion and humor, nonsense and puns, jokes and tenderness. The reader will then find himself wandering the streets of Rome alongside Marianna Fuma and Ulisse Pulviscolo, Alice Tuttoburro and Winston Coleman, Ettore Calcestruzzo and Margherita l'Apriscatole, through the wards of the San Giovanni Addolorata hospital, "the gender-fluid hospital," and the Porta Portese market, in a relentless and adventurous search. The outcome finally becomes transparent, and the cabinet of curiosities opens to reveal what it held: a core of pain waiting to be acknowledged and shared with a humanity dazed, confused, dreamy, resilient yet fragile, and therefore, like each of us, completely unprepared to face it. This is what stories are for, after all: to transform a pang of the heart into relief, a fall into a leap toward the fantastic; to fold a sheet of paper into the delicate flight of origami.