M: Son of the Century: A Novel

by Antonio Scurati, Anne Milano Appel (Translator), Jonathan Oliver (Read by)

Overview

The massive international bestseller—an epic historical novel that chronicles the birth and rise of fascism in Italy, witnessed through the eyes of its founder, the terrifyingly charismatic figure who would become one of the most notorious dictators of the twentieth century, Benito Mussolini.

It is 1919, and the Great War that has ravaged Europe is over. In Italy, the people are exhausted. Tired of the political class. Tired of vague promises, inept moderates, and the agonizing machinations of a democracy that has failed ordinary citizens.

While elite leaders have sat idly by, achieving nothing, one outsider—the director of a small opposition newspaper and a tireless political agitator—is electrifying the masses, promising hope for a demoralized nation hungry for change.

A former socialist leader ousted by his own party, he is a drifter who knows what it is to feel lost. His voice speaks for the misfits and the outcasts; he is a protector of those who are forgotten. 

He is Benito Mussolini. And soon Italy—and the world—will be forever remade. 

In M: Son of the Century, Antonio Scurati tells the story of fascism from within the mind of its founder, the man known to his followers as Il Duce. Steeped in historical detail and interspersed with period documents and sources, this masterful saga explores the seductive power of nationalism and idolatry, revealing how authoritarianism took hold and a nation bent to the will of one ruthless strongman. Provocative and resonant, M is a chilling reminder that the past is never gone, and that it holds urgent lessons for us today. 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9798200856176
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	04/05/2022
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 7.50(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

Antonio Scurati was born in Naples in 1969 and lives in Milan. He is a Professor of Comparative Literature and Creative writing at the IULM University in Milan and a columnist for Corriere della Sera. He is the author of various novels which have won an array of literary prizes in Italy, and M: A Novel is the first to be made available in English. The first in a quartet of novels about Mussolini and the rise of fascism, it was the winner of the 2019 Strega award and has been translated into forty languages.

 

Editorial Reviews

02/21/2022

The expansive first installment of Scurati’s Strega Prize–winning tetralogy, his English-language debut, covers the rise of Benito Mussolini in the aftermath of WWI. In 1919, a rally of the Fasci Italiani di Combattimento signals fascism’s rise. With the war ended, Italy churns in turmoil as the troops, described by Scurati’s omniscient narrator as “forty thousand loose cannons,” return home. (A dramatis personae catalogues over 70 principal characters.) Sweeping statements by Mussolini (“The age of mass politics has begun”) combine with a range of primary sources, including newspapers and protesters’ graffiti. Scurati captures Italy’s past by blurring fiction’s boundary with history, such as with chapters narrated by Mussolini himself (“I am the misfit par excellence,” he avows). The historical sweep takes in fascist, socialist, and liberal ideologies competing for Italy’s future, and the author captivates with portrayals of various characters’ poignant struggles, such as the wealthy and obstinate real-life socialist leader Giacomo Matteotti, who was abducted and murdered by Fascists on June 10, 1924. The magisterial prose, adeptly translated by Appel, takes a bold look into the abyss, as readers will come to know “the Duce of fascism” and to understand “the Mussolini cyclone.” Scurati’s ambivalent portrait of a powerful fascist is sure to spark much debate. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

"Readers will find themselves swept up by the story, thrilled by its conflicts and strangely forgetful that its 'hero' is a murderous despot. It’s a dangerous lesson for a novel to convey, but a profoundly important one." — Wall Street Journal

From the Publisher

"Readers will find themselves swept up by the story, thrilled by its conflicts and strangely forgetful that its 'hero' is a murderous despot. It’s a dangerous lesson for a novel to convey, but a profoundly important one."

Wall Street Journal

11/01/2021

From Barenbaum, author of Barnes & Noble Discover pick A Bend in the Stars, Atomic Anna features a renowned nuclear scientist who is sleeping as Chernobyl melts down in 1986 and rips through time to meet her estranged daughter Molly in 1992, shot in the chest and begging her to go back and change the past (50,000-copy first printing). In Bird's Last Dance on the Starlight Pier, Evie Grace Devlin tries to leave vaudeville behind to become a nurse in 1930s Galveston, TX, but encounters setbacks and instead gets caught up in the shady world of dance marathons; following the Dublin International Literary Award long-listed Above the East China Sea (75,000-copy first printing). In Spur Award-winning Dallas's 1918 Denver-set Little Souls, sisters Helen and Lutie care for the daughter of a flu victim, and an abusive man's murder is covered up by leaving his body on the streets with all the other corpses to be collected (30,000-copy first printing). PEN/Robert W. Bingham finalist Llanos-Figueroa explores 19th-century Puerto Rican plantation society through Pola, A Woman of Endurance, captured in Africa and brought to Puerto Rico to bear babies subsequently taken from her and enslaved (40,000-copy first printing). First in a tetralogy, Scurati's internationally best-selling, Strega Award-winning M.—short for Mussolini—explores the rise of fascism in Italy (40,000-copy first printing). In The Good Left Undone, the New York Times best-selling Trigiana returns to Italy, where Matelda, the dying matriarch of a Tuscan artisan family, reveals her mother's love of the Scottish sea captain that fathered Matelda during World War II.

Library Journal

★ 2022-03-02
A brilliant, sprawling, polyvocal tale of the rise of Benito Mussolini in the immediate aftermath of World War I.

“We are a populace of ex-soldiers, a humanity of survivors, of dregs.” So, at the beginning of this volume—the first of a projected trilogy—thinks Mussolini, who has gathered some hundred veterans of terrible alpine battles like Caporetto (“an army of a million soldiers destroyed in a weekend”) to seize state power. Mussolini, writes Scurati, shifting to third-person narration, is intelligent, kind to his friends, cruel to his enemies, and “not content with second place.” He is also a master of disguising his true intentions, capable of both carrying on an affair with a Jewish lover and then aligning himself with the rising antisemitic Nazi movement in Germany. Scurati draws on a vast dramatis personae to tell Mussolini’s story, among its number are Enzo Ferrari, the automaker and early ally, and Gabriele D’Annunzio, the dandy and poet whose “insatiable desire for female conquests becomes a desire for territorial expansion.” But always at the center is Mussolini, who envisions that “fascism will complete the nationalization of Italians,” turning them away from their attachment to towns and regions to behold the empire they are about to secure on the faraway Horn of Africa. Scurati gives Mussolini his theatrically blowhard moments (“jutting his neck out, he clenches his jaw and searches for breathable air, his already nearly bald cranium tilted up to the sky”), but he makes clear that Mussolini and his militias are deadly serious about killing their enemies—Scurati’s account of the murder of socialist legislator Giacomo Matteotti may remind readers of the most brutal moments of Bernardo Bertolucci’s film 1900—and acquiring absolute, uncontested power. Given the recent drift of so many parliamentary and democratic nations toward authoritarianism, Scurati’s book could not be more timely, and it’s a superb exercise in blending historical fact and literary imagination.

A masterwork of modern Italian literature that will leave readers eager for more.

Kirkus Reviews