My Shadow Is Yours: A Novel [Mīkstie vāki]

"Recent college graduate Emiliano accompanies a 60 something writer, Vittorio, to a Milan fair where he will give a talk, breaking a 20 year long silence. "I have no house, only a shadow. But whenever you are in need of a shadow, my shadow is yours." This is a story, a love story, started forty years ago and never ended. And it is also the story of a trip to Italy in 2019, epic and comical, inebriated and amazed, very foolish, undertaken in a 1979 Jeep without a roof or doors or windshield by Emiliano DeVito, a just graduated summa cum laude in classical studies, and Vittorio Vezzosi, the writer of a single book, published in 1995 to worldwide acclaim, who has since shut himself up in a farmhouse above Florence without writing another word. While these two misfits of different generations are quarreling on their trip to Milan, they soon come to complement and understand one another in their differences"--

A recent college graduate accompanies a reclusive middle-aged writer on a chaotic road trip to Milan in this hilarious, heartwarming novel about love, friendship, and the pitfalls of nostalgia

In 1995 Vittorio Vezzosi rose to worldwide acclaim with his debut novel, The Wolves Inside. Unfortunately for his adoring fans—and his publisher—he wouldn’t write another word. Instead, the great author shut himself away in a farmhouse overlooking Florence.

After twenty-five years of silence, however, a corporate takeover lights the fire under Vittorio to produce a new novel, and bright young classics graduate Emiliano De Vito is hired to assist him. Off to a rocky start, the odd couple embark on a madcap journey in a 1979 Jeep—without a roof or windshield or doors—to Milan, where Vittorio will speak to a crowd of thousands.

As they travel across Italy, bonding over wine and women, and butting heads over the struggles Emiliano’s generation inherited from Vittorio’s, the two begin to see the world, and writing, in a different way.