{"title":"Michele Mari","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eMichele Mari\u003c\/strong\u003e offers a distinctive voice in contemporary fiction, weaving intricate narratives that delve into memory, identity, and the nuances of childhood. His work often blends poetic language with profound psychological insight, creating stories that resonate on both emotional and intellectual levels.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eReaders can expect richly layered tales such as \u003cem\u003eVerdigris\u003c\/em\u003e, \u003cem\u003eYou\u003c\/em\u003e, and \u003cem\u003eBleeding Childhood\u003c\/em\u003e, where the ordinary collides with the surreal, exploring the fragility and complexity of human experience with delicate precision.\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"verdigris-by-michele-mari-9781913505905","title":"Verdigris","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"book-description\"\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAt the tail end of the 1960s, the thirteen-year-old Michelino spends his summers at his grandparents' modest estate in Nasca, near Lake Maggiore, losing himself in the tales of horror, adventure, and mystery shelved in his grandfather's library. The greatest mystery he's ever encountered, however, doesn't come from a book—it's the groundskeeper, Felice, a sometimes frightening, sometimes gentle, always colourful man of uncertain age who speaks an enchanting dialect and whose memory gets worse with each passing day.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eWhen Michelino volunteers to help the old man by providing him with clever mnemonic devices to keep his memory alive, the boy soon finds himself obsessed with piecing together the eerie hodgepodge of Felice's biography...a quest that leads to the uncovering of skeletons in Nazi uniforms in the attic, to Felice's admission that he can hear the voices of the dead, and to a new perspective on Felice's endless war against the insatiable local slugs, who are by no means merely a horticultural threat.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eAnd yet nothing could be more fascinating to Michelino than Felice's own secret origins. Where did he come from? Is he the victim or the villain of his story? Is he a noble hero, a holy fool, or perhaps the very thing that Michelino most wants and fears: a real-life monster.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Unknown","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47487748538604,"sku":"9781913505905","price":52.0,"currency_code":"NZD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0705\/7784\/8556\/files\/c8e0a51c3407dadb8ab27b4640c902c3.jpg?v=1775769465"},{"product_id":"you-bleeding-childhood-by-michele-mari-9781913505684","title":"You, Bleeding Childhood","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"book-description\"\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eItaly's great chronicler of the macabre and hilarious terrors of growing up geeky arrives in English at last.\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eLong before the latest vogue for autofiction, Michele Mari, one of Italy's most beloved authors, cast his mind back to the days of his own childhood, and found it crawling with monsters.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eRaised on comic books and science fiction, the young Mari constructed an alternate universe for himself untouched by uncomprehending grownups or sadistic peers. Compared to the horrors of real life, Long John Silver and Cthulhu made for positively cuddly company; but little boys raised by beasts may well grow up beastly—or never grow up at all.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eWaking or sleeping, the obsessions of Mari's youth seem to colour his every adult thought. \u003cem\u003eYou, Bleeding Childhood\u003c\/em\u003e stands as his first attempt to catalog this cabinet of wonders.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eCult classics since their first publication, these loosely connected stories stand as the ideal introduction to an encyclopedic fantasist on a par with Kafka, Poe, and Borges.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Unknown","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47487785763052,"sku":"9781913505684","price":32.99,"currency_code":"NZD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0705\/7784\/8556\/files\/c139af7cc495f739be0242a680718d15.jpg?v=1775768566"}],"url":"https:\/\/bookhero.co.nz\/collections\/michele-mari.oembed","provider":"Book Hero","version":"1.0","type":"link"}