L' Anatra Sposa - a Novel by Marta Ceroni 

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Please select video subtitles in English, if preferred. At this time, this novel is only available in Italian.
Translated synopsis by the publisher (Bompiani): Inscrutable and powerful, always in motion yet always equal to itself: in the plain it seems that the river is the only divinity capable of giving life or taking it. So in Ghiarole, a floodplain village, when the mud from the flood isolates houses and people, one doesn't complain too much and picks up the shovel. Life flows to the rhythm of unchangeable seasons like the sign of the "Don Camillo" hotel, like the skirmishes at the "osteria" between those who read L'Unita' [communist newspaper] and those who go to mass at Don Cagna's. Yet something is changing. Of course, summer is back, and a Milanese family has settled in the village, and then at the theater in Brescello they're looking for local actors for a play of the Odyssey. But it's not just this. It is that the two feral sisters, who live in the most isolated house along the levee, have grown up: Nevia has become beautiful, soft and distracted like a cloud in the sky, and Alda, on the contrary, mysterious and proud, is pedaling so fast that she seems to belong to another world. Neither Don Cagna, nor Nene, nor the nuns at the kindergarten or that wretched Ermanno know that this time it will not be the flood that will change everything, but Nazareno, the shepherd, and with him a duck with marvelous blue, white, golden feathers. A wood duck [the Italian name for this species literally translates to "bride duck"]. This novel is a story of liberation but at the same time of surrender to the mysterious laws of nature, which guide some creatures towards a safe nest and others towards the discovery of wider horizons. Marta Ceroni, born in Milan, has lived in the United States for decades. And it is as if this distance has helped her to choose the words to describe her places in the most vivid way: “Like binoculars that showed poignant details and movements. Some rudeness of destiny made it so that one could see the things of everyday only at the moment of leaving.
Book cover art by Charlotte van Driel.