Recent History: A Novel

Synopsis: When Luca Carcera is twelve years old, his father moves out under mysterious circumstances. He surfaces across town, in a run-down rooming house, living with another man. Luca is equally surprised by his mother’s burgeoning sexuality after her husband’s departure. And what about Luca’s own adolescent sexual awakening? He has an unusually intense friendship with a boy at school. He’s also drawn to his attractive female neighbor. He can’t choose. He’s overwhelmed by the degree to which sex can shatter the status quo. He shuts down.

We meet Luca again as an adult. His wife wants a child, and that terrifies him. But more terrifyingly still, he’s been married for twelve years — the precise length of time his own father was married when he admitted his feelings for another man — when he gets a phone call that yanks him back to the past he’s tried so hard to ignore. Now he wonders if he’ll do exactly what his father did.

With this extraordinarily intelligent and sensitive exploration of sexuality — what it means to look deep within oneself and resist looking away — Giardina plumbs great emotion depths with his trademark literary grace.