A dinner. Thirty schoolmates. A pact meant to last a lifetime. Or perhaps many deaths.
There is a night when the future changes forever. It is July 22, 1975, when a class just out of high school makes a simple yet unsettling agreement: every year they will contribute to a fund meant to become a fortune. Only the last three survivors will cash in.
From this striking idea arises The Stone Guests, the new novel by Michele Mari, nominated for the Strega Prize 2026: a dizzying reflection on time, fate, and the bonds that never cease to pursue us. Every anniversary becomes an appointment with memory, every absence a foreboding, every toast a challenge between nostalgia, desire, rivalry, and fear.
With his visionary, ironic, and magnetic writing, Mari guides the reader on a journey that spans decades of lives, transforming a simple dinner among former classmates into a great choral tale about the obsession with the passage of time and the impossibility of escaping the past. Because the past does not follow us: it inhabits us.
A meeting with one of the greatest contemporary Italian storytellers, where literature and imagination merge into an intense, surprising, and profoundly human experience.
Free admission until seats are exhausted
