Live Bait: A Novel

The story of a small Italian town where fishing, biking, and rock 'n' roll make the news, until tragedy turns everything upside down.

Muglione. Nothing grows in this Tuscan backwater except the wild imagination of Fiorenzo, a nineteen-year-old metalhead. He lives for his garage band, horror movies, and fishing in the murky irrigation ditches outside of town. But when his path crosses with Mirko, the teenage cycling phenomenon, and Tiziana, the smart but frustrated head of the local youth center turned refuge for the town's hard-drinking seniors, his world will never be the same. From the brink of despair they fight their way back through honesty, resilience, and laughter, their fates interweaving in a story that is at once achingly funny, bitter, and full of poetic fervor.

Told with the tenderness of a Fellini film, this contemporary novel continues the great tradition of Italian literature and cinema.