The Lake's Water Is Never Sweet

In her English-language debut, award-winning Italian novelist Giulia Caminito follows a teenage girl as her family transitions from Rome's impoverished outskirts to a fraught new beginning in a tranquil lakeside town, capturing the disillusionment, loneliness, and rage that defined a generation.

In the 1990s, Gaia's family moves from the neglected peripheries of Rome to an idyllic lakeside town twenty miles away, in search of a new life that will lift them out of poverty. Each of them bears their own scars: Gaia's strong-willed mother is fiercely determined to secure a better future for her children at any cost; her father, a once proud man, now suffers in bitter silence after a devastating accident; her anarchist older brother rebels against the political apathy he sees at home; and her young twin brothers wordlessly bear witness to a family in decay.

When Gaia meets two local girls, Agata and Carlotta, the trio builds a fragile friendship throughout their adolescence based as much on their insecurities and jealousies as it is on their mutual affection. Gaia's encounters with callous boys and contemptuous teachers convince her that she might always be an outsider--excluded from a privileged life and perhaps even beyond the possibility of happiness. Faced with bullying and betrayals among her peers and immense pressure from her mother to excel, Gaia turns inward and her world becomes increasingly insular. Then tragedy strikes her friend group. As more friends slip away and her family fractures, Gaia vows to make the world pay for all the things it has denied her.

Winner of the Campiello Prize, The Lake's Water Is Never Sweet is an unflinching portrait of a generation, striving to make a place for themselves in a world markedly different from the one their parents promised them. With psychological acuity and stylish prose, Caminito takes us into the volatile, searching mind of a young woman torn between her desire to connect with others and her drive for self-preservation. In a novel that has been acclaimed by readers around the world, Caminito shows how tenderness and fragility often lie just beneath the surface of simmering fury.

Giulia Caminito's first novel, The Big A (Giunti, 2016), won the Bagutta Opera Prima Prize, the Berto Prize, and the Brancati Giovani Prize. She is also the author of The Day Will Come (Bompiani, 2019), The Lake's Water Is Never Sweet (Bompiani, 2021), and Amatissime (Giulio Perrone, 2022). The Lake's Water Is Never Sweet won the 2021 Campiello Prize and was a finalist for the Strega Prize. Caminito's books have been translated in over 20 countries. She lives in Rome.

Hope Campbell Gustafson's previous book-length translations include Commander of the River by Ubah Cristina Ali Farah and Islands-New Islands: A Vagabond Guide to Romeby Marco Lodoli. From Minneapolis, now living in Brooklyn, she also works for the Civitella Ranieri Foundation.