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“At the heart of this novel is the dichotomy between idealized eternal love, as in the Greek myth, and the real, embodied, mortal kind. Through it all, Starnone’s prose is charming, witty, and intellectual.”

— Booklist, Aug 29 2024

“The structure of this novel is intricate and masterful, and like the finest made structures, it is shaped by the storytelling and not the other way around.”

— Electric Lit, Aug 14 2024

“Full of beauty and insight, Starnone’s narrative contrasts youth and old age, education and natural wisdom, dreams and reality. This won’t be easily forgotten.”

— Publishers Weekly, Aug 7 2024

“Oonagh Stransky’s translation of Domenico Starnone’s monumental novel The House on Via Gemito (Europa Editions, 2023) is a tour de force.”

— Reading in Translation, May 27 2024

“This contemporary masterpiece was certainly worth the wait.”

— Evening Standard, Apr 2 2024

“The House on Via Gemito serves to show his English readership how much broader his talent is.”

— Rain Taxi Review of Books, Jan 18 2024

“[The House on Via Gemito] is readable and elegant.”

— Times Literary Supplement, Jul 12 2023

“The House On Via Gemito is an exuberant portrait of the writer as a young (and then middle-aged) man, and an allegory of the role of the artist, adrift in the Sargasso of modernity.”

— On the Seawall, Jul 12 2023

“A vivid, fluid, richly detailed drama, tormented and hilarious.”

— The Washington Post, Jul 12 2023

“Starnone is a writer exquisitely attuned to class anxieties: As his later novels do, Via Gemito explores the emotional cost of class mobility, and the psychic toll of changing one’s speech patterns and behavior for the sake of social and financial gain.”

— The Atlantic, Jul 10 2023

“[The House on Via Gemito] presents a vivid rainbow of sediments."

— The Brooklyn Rail, May 30 2023

"Starnone the novelist succeeds beautifully in exploiting Federì’s self-contradictions and the unreliability of memory to create what is both a complex family narrative and a masterpiece on the elusive nature of truth."

— The New York Times Book Review, May 30 2023

★ “Every character...is a full-fledged human being filled with desire, regret, resentment, bitterness, and hope. At the same time, the Neapolitan setting comes equally alive...Starnone, it seems, can do no wrong. A complexly structured masterpiece.”

— Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review), Mar 17 2023

“Indirection like that, stirring up terrific curiosity, proves one of the novel’s best gambits...I’d call it the best of Lahiri’s Starnone essays — a fine fit for the best of his recent creative surge.”

— Washington Post, Nov 10 2021

“With a few deft strokes of his concentrated prose, [Starnone] tears down the curtains, blinding his audience with daylight.”

— Los Angeles Review of Books, Nov 9 2021

“A sweeping examination of aging, love, and success... This is the third of Starnone’s novels that Lahiri has translated over the last six years, and her deft hand seamlessly reveals Starnone’s masterful narrative at every turn.”

— Booklist, Nov 9 2021

“A short, sharp novel that cuts like a scalpel to the core of its characters... Starnone has earned a reader’s trust with another agile analysis of frail humanity.”

— Los Angeles Times, Nov 8 2021

“This type of revelation is what translating Starnone’s work has taught me about language and about words—that they change as we blink and that they are rich with alternatives. It is my engagement with his texts that has rendered me, definitively, a translator.”

— The New Yorker, Nov 6 2021

“Electrifying... [Starnone] portrays unflinchingly the violence, physical and verbal, that can erupt within the closest relationships.”

— Financial Times, Nov 5 2021

“An Italian master gives it a suspenseful twist in this vibrant novel that’s equal parts Endless Love, la dolce vita, and unreliable narration...A rip of a read.”

— Oprah Daily, Oct 13 2021