Reading matters

'I'm Not Scared' by Niccolo Ammaniti

Fiction - paperback; Canongate; 225 pages; 2003. (Translated from the Italian by Jonathan Hunt.)

Books about childhood that truly get inside the mind of a child are difficult feats to accomplish. How do you recapture the innocence, that naive sense of wonder, that wide-eyed outlook on life untouched by greater human experience without talking down to your reader or coming across as if you're trying too hard?

Whatever the trick, Italian author Niccolo Ammaniti has achieved it. In spades.

The somewhat ludicrously titled I'm Not Scared is a delicious treat, one that transports the reader back to that time when the adult world was incomprehensible and the best thing about life was riding your bicycle throughout the long, hot school holidays that lay ahead every summer.

'The Colombian Mule' by Massimo Carlotto

Fiction - paperback; Orion (an Imprint of The Orion Publishing Group Ltd ) - New Ed edition; 184  pages; 2004.

"Somehow the Colombian knew he was fucked the moment he met the cop's gaze."

So begins Massimo Carlotto's hardboiled Italian noir novel The Colombian Mule, which opens with Arias Cuevas being detained at Venice airport with a belly full of cocaine. When Cuevas describes his drug-smuggling contact -- "about fifty, medium-height, a bit fat, with light brown hair" -- the Italian police arrest the wrong man. Is it a case of mistaken identity, or are the police bending the law for their own means?

'Death's Dark Abyss' by Massimo Carlotto

Fiction - paperback; Europa Editions; 152  pages; 2007. (Translated from the Italian  by Lawrence Venuti.) REVIEW COPY.

If  you were the victim of a horrendous crime in which your spouse and child were murdered and you were later given the opportunity to dole out your own form of justice, would you do it?

This is the premise behind Massimo Carlotto's dark and disturbing Death's Dark Abyss, which is released in the UK by Europa Editions, an Italian independent publisher, later this week (February 8).

'Without Blood' by Alessandro Baricco

Fiction - paperback; Canongate Books; 87  pages; 2005. (Translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein.)

When this book popped through my letter box earlier this week (a spontaneous purchase from Amazon.co.uk - I know, you shouldn't let me loose on the internet) I was amazed at how anorexic it looked: 87 short pages filled with relatively large type. I read the book cover to cover in less than an hour and now, forced to try and shape my thoughts about it into some semblance of a review, I feel myself itching to read it again.