The Life of Those Left Behind; A Novel

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In this heartbreaking yet hopeful autobiographical novel, an acclaimed Italian author who lost his partner to suicide testifies to the power of storytelling in living with grief. When 30-year-old Matteo B. Bianchi published his debut novel in 1999, the timing couldn’t have been worse: he had just lost S., the man he’d lived with for 7 years, who one day, a few months after they broke up, killed himself in their apartment. Matteo discovers the body. He feels trapped in a labyrinth of contradictory emotions and constant bewilderment, which unites all the so-called survivors of the suicide of a loved one. Yet even in his darkest hours, the writer in him starts taking notes. At first they are just fragments, shards of an existence shattered into a thousand pieces. Then they slowly transform and, memory after memory, become a profound conversation with S., caught between the temptation to let go and the desire to get back to life. Both radical and