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Story of a Blackcap March 2027

Storia di una capinera  ·  Giovanni Verga, 1871

Translated and introduced by Idara Crespi

Giovanni Verga's first popular success, published in 1871: the novel that established his reputation before the darker realist work for which he is best known. Written entirely in letters, it tells the story of a young woman confined to a convent against her will, whose correspondence with a childhood friend becomes her one connection to the world outside. Heartbreaking and formally precise, it has been read in Italy for 150 years and never received a worthy English translation. This edition is the first.

Paperback edition available March 2027.

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Marta, or Faith September 2026

I Misteri di Napoli, Vol. I  ·  Francesco Mastriani, 1869–70

Translated and introduced by Idara Crespi

When Eugène Sue's Les Mystères de Paris captivated Europe in the 1840s, it inspired writers across the continent to attempt their own versions: portraits of city life seen from below, tracing the lives of the poor alongside the powerful. In Naples, no one answered that challenge more ambitiously than Francesco Mastriani.

I Misteri di Napoli is Mastriani's masterwork: a panoramic novel of nineteenth-century Naples that ran to hundreds of chapters and was read across the Italian peninsula. Marta, or Faith is the first complete volume, introducing a cast of characters whose stories unfold across the series, set against a city of startling beauty and severe inequality.

This will be the first English translation of any volume of I Misteri di Napoli.

Paperback edition available September 2026.

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Madame Chrysanthème July 2026

Madame Chrysanthème  ·  Pierre Loti, 1887

Translated by Clémence Aubert

In the summer of 1885, French naval officer Pierre Loti arrived in Nagasaki on a three-month posting and arranged, following local custom, to rent a small house and a temporary wife. Madame Chrysanthème is the novel he made from that arrangement: part journal, part portrait, written in a voice of such cool, precise attention that it is sometimes mistaken for indifference. It is not. Loti watches everything: the paper screens, the painted fans, the coins his wife tests between her teeth on the last morning. What he cannot quite see is Chrysanthème herself.

The novel reached Paris in 1887 and made Loti one of the most widely read French novelists of his era. It set in motion a chain of adaptations (a short story, a Broadway play, an opera) that ended in Puccini's Madama Butterfly. This is its first new English translation in over a century.

This edition includes a translator's note by Clémence Aubert, a glossary of Japanese terms, and historical notes on Loti, the 1885 Nagasaki posting, and the novel's afterlife in opera and theatre.

Paperback edition available July 2026.

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