Nicola Brami grew up in Ghedi, Brescia. After eight years spent between Ireland and the United States, he returned to Italy, where he now works in translation and communication for an international company. In 2020 he published the novel Tutti se ne vanno with La Torre dei Venti, followed in 2024 by Melinoe vestita di zafferano, (A Saffron Dress for Melinoe) published by Atlantide.
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MELINOE VESTITA DI ZAFFERANO: Enea is a young math professor who divides himself between work, his now routine love for Lorna, tennis matches and his aloof relationship with his older brother Nicola, a successful writer. His life changes when one morning he rings home and someone with a voice identical to his, and claiming to be him, answers. That is the moment when an impossible and frightening thought arises in Enea’s mind : there is a double of his in the world, someone who looks exactly like him, lives in the same house as him, teaches at his school, and replaces him on the tennis court. Meanwhile, as Nicola reveals to Enea that he is suffering from a deadly disease, the latter learns of esoteric rituals in which his brother had participated in the past, led by Melinoe, a girl who seems to possess ancient knowledge beyond the human, and whose effects seem, mysteriously, to reverberate to this day…
Nicola Brami writes a hypnotic book, at once sensual and vivid, like a dark dream that instead of fading away in the morning becomes more and more real, and that within itself conceals the most dizzying and terrifying of questions: who am I?
PRESS REVIEW.
“Are we, in short, in the folk horror canon, or in an ambitious pastiche rooted in the Freudian Unheimlich? Let the reader decide. In the realm of the ambiguous, solving the mystery may even be irrelevant. Provided that plot and structure, as in this case, are convincing.”
Giancarlo De Cataldo – Tuttolibri, La Stampa
“Melinoe vestita di zafferano boasts the virtue of not allowing any distraction, so well conceived and tight the plot is, thanks to the accurate alternation of the temporal play. It is precisely this choice, carried out with agile confidence, that produces an attractive narrative mechanism, right to the end. Fortifying and adorning this excellent choice is the aura that the novel releases. Never serene, never predictable, but rather anguishing, smoky and mysterious.”
Orazio Labbate – La Lettura, Corriere della Sera
“Read in one sitting. Serious horror at last.”
Loredana Lipperini, Fahrenheit, Rai Radio 3
“With a manner reminiscent as much of the questions about identity in 20th-century literature as of the more contemporary forms of the weird, Brami’s novel plunges into a magical and esoteric world that seems to originate from strange rituals performed in the past by Enea together with a mysterious and irresistible girl […] Gradually the reader loses the coordinates of reality in a successful literary game that recalls Lynch’s more enigmatic atmospheres and that, as in the American director’s movies, always invites him to question what is happening.”
Matteo Moca, Blow Up.
“The theme of the double, repeatedly taken up by director David Lynch, experiences a new declination here. Brami reflects on the ambiguity of the processes that regulate life, chasing traces of the dark secrets that rule it and running into the balancing games that hold it up, in which each element seems connected to the other in a delicate and complex system of compromises.”
Daniele Scalese – Criticaletteraria.org
“A story with numerous religious, literary and cinematic references, this Melinoe vestita di zafferano, a kaleidoscopic novel that impossible to contain in a single narrative genre, starts from transcendental meditation to take us into the shadowy areas of a family affair marked by a tragic accident that will forever doom its fragile balance.”
Stefano Bonazzi – Satisfiction.eu
RESULTS
- Fahrenheit Radio 3’s Book of the Month for April 2024.
- Shortlisted at the International Prize City of Sassari (winners not yet announced).
- Winner of the Quality Micropublishing Mark at the Chiari Micropublishing Fair.
