Steal You Away

* Another powerful story about the loss of childhood innocence in small-town Italy from Rome-born author Ammaniti - who wrote the highly acclaimed I'm Not Scared. Financial Times * Niccolo Ammaniti's second novel, Steal You Away, published in Italy in 1999, is also about a boy faced with difficult moral choices that will define his future. It traces the path to Ammaniti's follow-up, I'm Not Scared, the global bestseller that became a hit film in 2003. In the end, we get two heart-wrenching love stories for the price of one. This young storyteller exercises the confidence, honesty and sensibility of a master without spilling a drop of sweat. The Times * Again Ammaniti uncovers the tragedy in ordinary people's lives - the awful gap between dream and reality - and skewers it to the page with such elegance that you cannot tear yourself away from the inexorable trajectory of ruin. The Big Issue * Ammaniti...has the gift of authority combined with an instinctive understanding of how his characters will behave in every circumstance...Protracted and entertaining, it is also intensely moving at its accelerated conclusion...This is a Brueghel, a canvas...each character's pathway affecting the poise of the whole spun web, the very weightlessness of which gives the book what Milan Kundera calls the unbearable lightness of being. -- Tom Adair