I'm Not Scared, Canons

Name: I'm Not Scared, Canons
Author: Niccolò Ammaniti, Jonathan Hunt

The international bestselling novel “of childhood innocence lost in rural Italy [is] a gripping read … a deft masterpiece with never a false note” (The Guardian, UK).

A BBC Two Between The Covers Book Club Pick

Southern Italy, 1978. In the midst of a relentlessly hot summer, as the adults stay inside tending to their own business, six children explore the scorched wheat fields that enclose their tiny Italian village. When the gang find a dilapidated farmhouse, nine-year-old Michele Amitrano makes a discovery so momentous that he doesn’t dare tell a soul. It is a secret that Michele doesn’t fully understand, yet it will force him to question everything and everyone around him, and will bring his innocent world toppling down.

Both “an exquisite parable” and a tense thriller, I’m Not Scared has become a contemporary classic in Italian literature, read and celebrated the world over (Daily Telegraph, UK).

Niccolò Ammaniti, Jonathan Hunt

Niccolò Ammaniti was born in Rome in 1966. He is the author of five novels translated into English and two short story collections. Several of his novels have been adapted for film, including Steal You Away, which was longlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, The Crossroads, winner of the Premio Strega Prize 2007, and the international bestseller I'm Not Scared, which won the prestigious Italian Viareggio-Repaci Prize for Fiction and has been translated into thirty-five languages.