At GO, we will present Sara Sandro Sofia. Storie allo specchio delle stagioni (Armando Siciliano Editore) with the author Carmelo De Marco, publisher Armando Siciliano, Gabriele Becatti, and Francesco Zini.

The Book:

Sara, Sandro, and Sofia are the protagonists of three stories set in different times and places, all connected by recurring themes: love, betrayal, and rebirth. They speak directly to the reader in the first person, revealing—through the threads of their lives—the limits of a deeply rooted patriarchal culture.

In post-war Sicily, in 1954, Sara appears to be a woman ahead of her time. Of average education but unprepared for the harsh realities she witnesses, she gradually becomes more self-aware, breaking through societal prejudice with courage and determination—even, paradoxically, the prejudice coming from other women.

In 1980s Naples, Sandro represents the archetype of a man who doesn’t leave his family even when nothing binds him to it anymore, and his love for another woman fills the void in his life.

In Bologna in 2022, Sofia is a lost thirty-year-old woman still living with her parents. Disillusioned by her early experiences of love, she stumbles—giving in to sexual temptation—into an affair with a handsome but married man with two children.

The author delves deep into the female psyche, exploring its drives and feelings, even the most conflicted ones, while tying the narrative closely to key events of each era: the horrors of World War II, the birth of the Italian Republic, the terrorist attacks of the 1980s, and the 2022 elections that marked the rise of the right wing.

These are stories of love and betrayal that never fall into the illusion of friendship, placing women at the center—because from one century to the next, from north to south, the settings, technologies, and needs may change, but the patriarchal culture remains. The idea of the man-woman relationship as one of female submission to male possessiveness still prevails.

This novel boldly presses on a wound that won’t be healed by shouting into the silence of predictable tragedies, but rather by a culture that educates from childhood—at school and within families.
Going against the current, like the women in this book.

The Author:

Carmelo De Marco was born in 1946 in Messina. A lawyer and legal scholar, he has published legal texts with Giuffrè and essays in legal and management journals. In the 1980s, he was a top manager in a financial-insurance group based in Bologna, where he lived for many years. He recently returned to his native land, Messina, where he now resides.

In 2008, he published a volume of poetry, Ho dimenticato di stirare (Firenze Libri); in 2018, Piatti galanti di un cuoco per caso, not a cookbook but a novel-non-novel: life stories featuring various ingredients. In 2020, he published the novel La tela di Marco (Europa), which in 2021 received an Honorary Diploma for its artistic value at the Milano International Literary Prize. In 2021, he released the poetry collection Parole, suoni, silenzi – Un’anima e due ali(Venilia e Valentina), receiving an Honorable Mention at the Casentino Literary Prize in 2022. In 2022, he published the novel 2024 – La bussola e i portici (Europa), which received a Merit Diploma at the Montefiore International Literary Prize in 2022 and the Lugano Prize at the Switzerland Literary Prize in 2023.