Pan Mac and FSG join forces for Prato coup

Pan Macmillan and Farrar, Straus & Giroux will publish a recently re-discovered full version of a "towering work of autobiographical fiction" from one of the giants of 20th-century Italian letters.

Picador’s Ravi Mirchandani and FSG’s Jonathan Galassi and Jeremy Davies jointly acquired North American, UK and Commonwealth English-language rights to Dolores Prato’s Giu’ La Piazza Non C’e’nessuno (Nobody in the Square) from Raffaella de Angelis, acting on behalf of Quodlibet Edizioni.

Prato, one of the leading writers in pre- and post-Second World War Italy, worked on Nobody in the Square, her long, final novel, from the early 1970s until her death in 1983.

A heavily condensed version of the book was published by Einaudi in 1980, edited by Natalia Ginzburg. Prato continued to write the full version after the title was issued. The text is a novelised version of Prato’s life, centring around her childhood as an introvert, raised by eccentric relatives.

Pan Mac said it planned to publish the "masterpiece of world literature" in spring 2022.