Return to Trieste

Three days mark Alma's return to Trieste, a city she left to start a new life. Now she has come back to claim an unexpected inheritance from her father – a man who hated the cult of the past and its legacy. In Trieste, Alma rediscovers a forgotten life: a beautiful house on the plane tree avenue and a house on the Karst, where they suddenly moved and where Vili, the son of two Belgrade intellectuals, arrived. Now it is from Vili that Alma must receive her father's inheritance. But Vili is the last person she wants to see again. Three days in Trieste become an impenetrable boundary between what was and cannot return – childhood, freedom, her father's Yugoslavia – and what will be.
Federica Manzon writes a novel in which identity, memory, and history constantly collide and elude one another, turning Trieste into a point from which we view our complex attempts to understand who we are and where our home is.