The Crossroads, by Niccolò Ammaniti
Over on the World Literature Forum, a Question and Answer session is taking shape. The site is always worth a visit, but tomorrow brings us a chance to speak directly, in a virtual sense, with Italian author Niccolò Ammaniti. Click here to add your questions .…
Ian Thompson, had this to say about Ammaniti’s new novel in his Guardian UK review:
Ammaniti’s best-known novel, I’m Not Scared, was a fable of adult cruelty and lost childhood innocence that sold more than 200,000 copies in Italy, later becoming an equally successful film. The book drew you in like The Blair Witch Project; I could not put it down. The Crossroads, his latest novel, unfolds in a provincial backwater in northern Italy, where teenagers are adrift and isolated in a world of internet porn and Metallica worship.
The book borrows from the cartoon violence of Taxi Driver and Dog Day Afternoon as well as the glazed, JG Ballard-like prose of Alex Garland’s thriller The Tesseract to create a sequence of stories within stories.
Sounds like the perfect book to read in front of a nice fire, cognac in hand, your smoking jacket and slippers on, waiting for the wind to howl a little less outside. 
