“The novel's great theme is the return, the dream of returning, the horror of the return, the substantial impossibility of returning. … Return, in the sense of finding, is also the dream of Valentino-Mario, extreme branch of the great family  tree; and he is very lucky to be able to make it happen, even if only thanks to the magic of writing.”
Isabella Bossi Fedrigotti, Corriere della Sera

 
“The South has been narrated by Italian narrators, from Verga to Alvaro, from Jovine to Sciascia, in many ways but always related to a certain realism. Mario Fortunato tries to move away from it. The narrator's voice telling the stories of Jewish and non-Jewish families across the whole Twentieth century is often ironic, never abrupt, even in the storm of Fascism and the Second World War.”
Renzo Paris, Il Venerdì di Repubblica

 "Beautiful, gorgeous, sensual, seductive and magnetic since the cover image, Mario Fortunato's new book is a journey through time, history, space, passions."
Francesco Mannoni, Giornale di Brescia
 
"Mario Fortunato – writer, literary critic and author of successful novels, including The Innocent Days of War (winner of various awards), defined by Le Monde as the "master of the short story" - has surely written his most beautiful book: Sud is a family saga with all the nuances of love and pain, a tale of life that has a majestic literary step and is the reconstruction of a distant era." 
Gabriele Ottaviani, Convenzionali

“[An] archly observed novel…playful, kaleidoscopic…wonderfully eccentric minor characters—chauffeurs, nursemaids, household servants—vie for center stage with the equally eccentric bourgeois clans that employ them…it's ‘like a page out of Proust but without any aristocrats.’” —New York Times Book Review
 

“[An] exuberant, dizzying family saga…[a] wild ride through twentieth-century Italy, both political and personal.” —Booklist
 

“A sweeping story of family, community, and country, South is a saga in the truest sense of the word. In lush, enthralling, often funny prose, Fortunato beautifully captures both the great dramas and small poignancies that make up a life.” —Francesca Giacco, author of Six Days in Rome
 

Praise for Mario Fortunato:

“As I read Fortunato's writing, I have the impression of being faced with that kind of writer, rare in Italian literature, who, despite starting from a poetic state of mind, nevertheless manages to be a storyteller.” —Alberto Moravia
 
“Mario Fortunato is a natural storyteller.” —Doris Lessing