Fumando Una Sigaretta

Emotion prevails over reason and common sense, in the years of the Nazi occupation of Italy as well as in our own day. Stefano Manca, a writer and a soldier; Brando Malaspina, a British historian of Italian origin: two lives so far away from each other and so yet similar as to the individual choices that have a tragic bearing upon them. This is the theme of a love-and-war novel that in the time span of a smoke shows itself to be a story of human contradictions. A story, narrated from two separate points of view, where in 1944 the lust for Febe, the intellectual wife of an officer of the Fascist army, and now the lust for Buba, the cosmopolitan Milanese who cannot free herself from a relationship rooted in sympathy and compassion, make the protagonists incapable of coping with the challenges of reality.

Riccardo Maffey, a member of the British Chartered Institute of Journalists, was educated at the London Institute of World Affairs and at the University of Essex, where he gained an MA. He has been a London correspondent and foreign editor with several Italian newspapers. He was senior economics editor with the United States Information Service in Rome, worked as a feature writer, commentator and presenter for the BBC Italian Section, programme organizer and chief producer of the Radio of the Daily American in Rome, and did a lot of broadcasting and interviewing for the Italian Swiss Radio from London, Rome, Dublin, Belfast, and the US. Riccardo Maffey has also published The Sand Against the Wind (in English), Gioco a somma zero (in Italian), Diana Mosley venere del fascismo (in Italian), Dud Cheque (in English), and Harassment (in English). An Italian-born British citizen, he lives with his wife, Laura, in England.