Me and You

Fourteen-year-old Lorenzo tells his mother he's been invited to join a group of school friends on a week's vacation of skiing. But Lorenzo doesn't really have any friends, and there is no skiing trip. Now he has to figure out how to convince his mother not to drive him there, because Lorenzo is going to disappear--for one week he is going to hide out downstairs in his building's storage room, enjoying his PlayStation, three Stephen King novels and a couple of Marvel comics. He's stashed enough food and supplies to get him comfortably through the seven days without his parents ever suspecting. And no one ever goes down there.

As Niccolò Ammaniti begins his very short novel, it's 10 years later, and Lorenzo is a young man sitting by himself in a restaurant in a little town, staring down at a cup of coffee and about to re-read a short letter written 10 years earlier by his half-sister, Olivia.

The context of the letter is the basis of the novel. How the lives of Lorenzo and Olivia converge and change each other, each one filling the gaping hole in the other's life, creates a touching alliance, providing a brief respite from the alienation of their lives. As Lorenzo pieces together the tragic past and miserable present of his half-sister, the two reach out and almost heal each other.

This is the third novel by Ammaniti to be translated since his brilliant little masterpiece, I'm Not Scared, became an international sensation and a popular foreign film. In Me and You, Ammaniti's spare style becomes so lean the tale is hardly more than a short story, but don't discount it for its brevity. It's a literary experience that packs an enormous emotional wallop. --Nick DiMartino, Nick's Picks, University Book Store, Seattle