The Imaginary Life of a Laurel Tree

An Italian teacher’s relationship with his male student sparks legal and personal turmoil in this compelling novel of truth, desire, and power.

A group of old friends are unexpectedly reunited in Calabria for a dinner party. When the conversation turns from reminiscing about their teen years to recent allegations against a local teacher, Marco Ferro, it unsettles the narrator. Days later, still reeling from the news, he sets out to learn more, grappling with the murky facts. His search rekindles a relationship with his former high school friend—Federica, beautiful and spoiled, married to Lino, and the mother of three boys—which in turn unspools in complicated and unanticipated ways. 

The action then moves to Tunisia, London, and Rome, in an incessant pursuit of who tells and who is told. In the end, it is the story of Marco Ferro and his young student Yussef, played out in both courtrooms and newspaper columns, that restores truth to the complicated sentimental geometries of the narrator and Federica.

Exploring secrets and entangled power dynamics, Mario Fortunato’s timely new novel raises questions that rarely have simple or unequivocal answers.

Mario Fortunato was born in Cirò, Calabria, Italy. For three decades he worked as a literary critic for the Italian current affairs magazine L’Espresso and directed the Italian Cultural Institute in London. In addition to writing novels such as South (Other Press, 2023), a New York Times Best Historical Fiction Book of the Year, and The Innocent Days of War (Other Press, 2025), he has translated into Italian works by Evelyn Waugh, Virginia Woolf, and Henry James.

Michael F. Moore is the award-winning translator, most recently, of The Betrothed, by Alessandro Manzoni, hailed as a landmark literary event. His translations range from twentieth-century classics—Agostino by Alberto Moravia and The Drowned and the Saved by Primo Levi—to contemporary novels, including Live Bait, by Fabio Genovesi. Moore is the former chair of the PEN/Heim Translation Fund and has a PhD in Italian from New York University. For many years he was also an interpreter at the United Nations and a full-time staff member of the Permanent Mission of Italy to the United Nations.