The latest addition to my website is Tullio Avoledo‘s L’anno dei dodici inverni [The Year of the Twelve Winters]. An old man comes to visit a couple and their baby in 1982, saying he wants to write a book about babies born on Christmas Day as their baby, Chiara, was. He comes most years, yet there is clearly something odd about him, not least of which he is able to predict future events and never seems to age. We also have a narrator, telling us of his own messy life. We follow Chiara who messes up her own life, after her father dies. Suddenly, we jump to 2028 and a futuristic London, where all the strange events of the previous part of the book are explained, with the writer Philip K Dick being key to the story. Yes, it is certainly part science fiction but it is also a very clever story and very well written but, sadly, not availabe in any other language.