Love is incomprehensible, a form of madness." Through the candor of Elba's gaze, the asylum becomes a place that is both comic and terrifying, like life itself-something Viola Ardone knows how to portray in all its ferocity and beauty.

Following the international success of The Children's Train and Oliva Denaro, Grande Meraviglia completes an ideal twentieth-century trilogy. In this magnificent coming-of-age novel, the bond between a young girl and the man who decides to free her reveals a deeply human need: to be recognized by another in order to feel that one exists.

Elba is named after a river-her mother chose the name. At first, they lived together in a place she calls the "half-world," which is in fact a psychiatric hospital. Then her mother disappeared, and all Elba could do was grow up, compiling her Diary of Mental Ailments and telling the newcomers in the ward about Doctors Colavolpe and Lampadina, about Nurse Gillette and Nana the dog. About her universe, in short-the only one she knows. At least until a young psychiatrist, Fausto Meraviglia, becomes determined to take her out of the asylum-or rather, to abolish asylums altogether, as provided for by the Basaglia Law passed a few years earlier. Dr. Meraviglia brings Elba to live in his home, as the one person he has chosen, and through her-he, who has never been a good father-learns the weight and the strength of fatherhood. With her intense, original, music-filled prose, Viola Ardone tells us that the love of others never depends solely on us. That is its mystery-but also its miracle.