From the bestselling Italian author comes a novel based on the true story of a priest who refused to surrender... The school year is finished, exams are over and summer stretches before seventeen-year-old Federico, full of promise and opportunity. But then he accepts a request from one of his teachers to help out at a youth club in the destitute Sicilian neighbourhood of Brancaccio. This narrow tangle of alleyways is controlled by local mafia thugs, but it is also the home of children like Francesco, Maria, Dario, Totò: children with none of Federico's privileges, but with a strength and vitality that changes his life forever.  Written in intensely passionate and lyrical prose, What Hell Is Not is the phenomenal Italian bestseller about a man who brought light to one of the darkest corners of Sicily, and who refused to give up on the future of its children. Perfect for fans of Elena Ferrante and Roberto Saviano.

At long last, the Italian bestseller White as Milk, Red as Blood, is available in English as White as Silence, Red as Song.

D'Avenia's International bestseller has been called Italy's The Fault in Our Stars. Leo is an ordinary sixteen-year-old: he loves hanging out with his friends, playing soccer, and zipping around on his motorbike. The time he has to spend at school is a drag, and his teachers are "a protected species that you hope will become extinct," so when a new history and philosophy teacher arrives, Leo greets him with his usual antipathy. But this young man turns out to be different. His eyes sparkle when he talks, and he encourages his students to live passionately and follow their dreams.

Leo now feels like a lion, as his name suggests, but there is still one thing that terrifies him: the color white. White is absence; everything related to deprivation and loss in his life is white. Red, on the other hand, is the color of love, passion, and blood; red is the color of Beatrice's hair. Leo's dream is a girl named Beatrice, the prettiest in school.

Beatrice is irresistible-one look from her is enough to make Leo forget about everything else.

There is, however, a female presence much closer to Leo, which he finds harder to see because she's right under his nose: the ever-dependable and serene Silvia. When he discovers that Beatrice has leukemia and that her disease is related to the white that scares him so much, Leo is forced to search within himself, to bleed and to be reborn.

In the process, he comes to understand that dreams must never die, and he finds the strength to believe in something bigger than himself.

White as Silence, Red as Song is not only a coming-of-age story and the narrative of a school year, but it is also a bold novel that, through Leo's monologue-at times easygoing and full of verve, at times more intimate and anguished-depicts what happens when suffering and shock burst into the world of a teenager, and the world of adults is rendered speechless.