Giovanni Grasso has a long career as a parliamentary journalist and since 2015 has held the position of advisor to the President of the Republic for press and communication. He has also written many essays, including the biographies of Oscar Luigi Scalfaro and Piersanti Mattarella, brother of the current President of the Republic and victim of the mafia in the 1980s.
For his first novel, “L'amore non lo vede nessuno” (Rizzoli, 2024, pp. 240, also e-book), Grasso made courageous choices, deciding to tell non-trivial themes and setting up a ruthless investigation into the authentic meaning of existence, which forces us in front of the mirror, eye to eye with the darkest part of us. The most hidden part, where we hide the unsaid, our envy, our pain, our anger and frustration.
In the novel, everything begins with a tragic and unexpected death, that of Federica, a woman in the prime of her life, a restless and rebellious woman, who since childhood had been the center of attention of her family, a little princess, then became a princess, perpetually seeking the limelight of family and friends. At least that's how her sister Silvia has always seen her, so different, docile, available, obedient, so far from Federica's capricious and unpredictable character.
But now Silvia begins to wonder if she really knew her sister and begins to experience a deep regret for no longer having the possibility of "exploring" Federica, of discovering her true essence. Or does this possibility still exist?
So, every Tuesday afternoon, for exactly sixty minutes, in an anonymous provincial bar, Silvia begins to meet, in secret, a charming stranger, a man who appeared out of nowhere and is willing to tell her about Federica. They are bound by a pact. He promised to reveal every detail of his relationship with Federica. In exchange, she promised not to do any research to discover the identity of her mysterious interlocutor. But is the story of that nameless, cultured and refined man really reliable? And to what extent can Silvia trust him? Above all, Silvia begins to suspect with increasing force that the car accident in which Federica lost her life was not so accidental after all...
The search for the truth, in a crescendo of twists and turns, will then become a surprising and painful journey , which will lead Silvia to face a tangle of contradictions and unspeakable secrets , between absolute loves and power games. It will lead her to discover the universe that Federica inhabited, a world in which it is easy to lose the boundary between innocence and guilt. Above all, Silvia will have to question herself on the need to forgive and forgive herself in order to continue living fully, not tied to the past, to the anger, pain, bitterness and resentment that we all cultivate in our unconscious.