Anna

Summer has ended, but the heat will not let up. Ash has covered everything. Weeds and wheat grow around the cars abandoned in the road.

Anna and Astor live in the house behind the fence, surviving in a world stripped of adults. The rooms are piled high with rubbish. Their mother's skeleton lies perfect on the bed.

And every few days, Anna must head out beyond the fence for provisions and medicine. Each time she goes, she may never come back.

A huge bestseller in Italy, Ammaniti's new novel, like Lord of the Flies or The Road, is a book about the survival of the human spirit after the worst has happened.

Niccolo Ammaniti was born in Rome in 1966. He is the author of five novels translated into English and two short story collections. Several of his novels have been adapted for film, including Steal You Away, which was longlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, The Crossroads, winner of the Premio Strega Prize 2007, and the international bestseller I'm Not Scared, which won the prestigious Italian Viareggio-Repaci Prize for Fiction and has been translated into thirty-five languages.

Translated from the Italian by Jonathan Hunt. Hunt divides his time between Italy and Britain. His translations include Niccolo Ammaniti's The Crossroads, Steal You Away and I'm Not Scared, Nicolai Lilin's Siberian Education, Luca Rastello's I Am the Market, and Giorgio Vasta's Time on My Hands