Three Light-Years: A Novel

by Canobbio, Andrea

  Marta notices it, too. She looks at her and asks her with a smile: “Have you already told me what month you’re in?”

  Then Silvia stands up abruptly, trembling, and says it’s really chilly, in that mid-mountain town. “I’ll just run and get a sweater from the car, I’ll be right back.” But she doesn’t move.

  Marta keeps looking at her.

  “I’m at the beginning,” Silvia said. “I’ve only just begun.”

  ALSO BY ANDREA CANOBBIO

  The Natural Disorder of Things

  A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Andrea Canobbio was born in Turin, Italy, where he currently lives. An editor at the publishing house Einaudi, where he has headed the foreign fiction department since 1995, he is the author of The Natural Disorder of Things (FSG, 2006). Three Light-Years won Italy’s prestigious Mondello Prize in 2013.

  A NOTE ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

  Anne Milano Appel, Ph.D., is an award-winning literary translator based in San Francisco. Her latest translations from the Italian include Claudio Magris’s Blindly, Goliarda Sapienza’s The Art of Joy, and Giovanni Arpino’s Scent of a Woman. A former library director and language teacher, has been translating professionally for more than fifteen years and is a member of ALTA, ATA, NCTA, and PEN. Many of her book-length translations have been published, and shorter works that she has authored or translated have appeared in other professional and literary venues.

  Farrar, Straus and Giroux

  18 West 18th Street, New York 10011

  Copyright © 2013 by Andrea Canobbio

  Translation copyright © 2014 by Anne Milano Appel

  All rights reserved

  Originally published in 2013 by Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, Italy, as Tre Anni Luce

  English translation published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

  First American edition, 2014

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Canobbio, Andrea, 1962–

  [Tre anni luce. English]

  Three light-years: a novel / Andrea Canobbio; Translated from the Italian by Anne Milano Appel.

  pages cm

  Originally published in 2013 by Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, Italy, as Tre Anni Luce.

  ISBN 978-0-374-27890-8 (hardback) — ISBN 978-0-374-71010-1 (ebook)

  I. Appel, Anne Milano, translator. II. Title.

  PQ4863.A545 T7413 2014

  853’.914–dc23

  2013039909

  www.fsgbooks.com

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