APRILE È UNA STRANA STAGIONE
This book is dedicated to Nina, one of the most beautiful souls I have ever had the good fortune to meet. Nina navigated the twentieth century with grace and lightness, living across three continents and embracing two different gender identities. With extraordinary intelligence and sensitivity, she loved both men and women, and through them continued to love herself, without ever succumbing to life’s hardships. More generally, this book is dedicated to anyone capable of fully accepting their own and others’ humanity, however impenetrable it may often remain.
“The complexity of human love and sexuality has often given rise, in some masterful novels, to unforgettable characters capable of giving voice to their desires and feelings beyond social conventions and prejudices. Consider, for example, books such as Virginia Woolf’s *Orlando* or Jeffrey Eugenides’ *Middlesex*. It is the magic of literature, capable of delving where no psychological or medical investigation can: into the impenetrable complexity of human nature and its desires.
In ‘April is a Strange Season’, a similar magic is at work. Gabriella Ambrosio portrays the life and adventures of a unique protagonist, who makes the duality of his sexuality—his attraction and fascination with both sexes—the fundamental reason for his existence, the real possibility of becoming the architect of his own conduct and of himself.
It is the fictionalised story of a real-life Italian filmmaker who, born in the 1930s, lived through the 20th century, travelling across three continents and, above all, navigating two genders: from his Neapolitan childhood in the post-war years – where the language of Gabriella Ambrosio, a Neapolitan by birth, softens in a poignant way – through adolescence in a boarding school, to adulthood with fatherhood and, at the same time, the most violent swings of the pendulum of his existence, loving men and women and being loved by both, living a thousand lives within a single one.
Thanks to impeccable writing, capable of sculpting the vicissitudes of an existential adventure with vivid words, Gabriella Ambrosio offers the reader a story in which a single rule triumphs: the law of love.”
This is a novel of rare grace and quiet defiance — a luminous meditation on love unbound by gender, carried by prose that shimmers with emotional precision. The author doesn’t just tell a story; she composes a kind of music, fluid and fearless, reminding us that language, like love, need not be confined.
Colum McCann
The protagonist traverses time and desire as a performer of his own existence, inhabiting the shifting boundary between the masculine and the feminine, memory and invention. There is no definitive form. The body is a palimpsest, continually rewritten by experience. April is a time of interlude, of uncertain blossoming, of possibility. April, ‘The cruellest of months’, as Guccini sang in my adolescence: and now this novel reminds me that in other times and in other ways, many of us have rejected identity as destiny and have embraced it as an open work, constantly being rewritten. Amidst mistakes, crossings-out and a few beautiful phrases not to be forgotten.
Eduardo Cicelyn
The style is calm, like a horse beginning to trot. Yet, at moments one could never have imagined, it undergoes sudden shifts that reveal the glowing core hidden beneath the surface. This horse throws language and expectations off balance.
Marcello La Matina
We feel the flesh pulsing, we follow the bodies as they draw towards one another, we are literally swept up in the spell.
Corriere del Mezzogiorno, 31.03.26
A poignant and courageous quest for love.
L’Espresso, 03.04.26
Through her writing, the author caresses the protagonist of the story (…) – nocturnal and diurnal, tragic and sacred in his everyday actions. (…) Every smile contains a violent element; Ambrosio is familiar with its mythologies and its furious outbursts, as well as its unique perspectives: his novel contains moments of luminous meditation on the meaning of existence.
Elio Grasso, Pulp Magazine, 06.04.26
The first-person narrator of the novel Aprile è una strana stagione – which is constructed almost in fragments – takes shape over a non-linear span of time. Many of his reflections explore the sexual encounters he has experienced: those that resemble ‘funeral dances’, those built upon ‘a baroque movement’, and those in which sex ‘is play, theatre, imagination’…
Il Mattino, 12.04.26
The literary form allows Ambrosio to fictionalise the protagonist’s unspeakable truths.
Il Messaggero, 12.04.26
Ambrosio weaves a story of sexual ambivalence into a narrative. Italy and the world form the backdrop.
Corriere della Sera, La Lettura, 12.04.26
An unusual and intriguing biography, a novel that blurs the lines between reality and fiction, full of secrets waiting to be uncovered.
La Stampa, 18.04.26
In an age when everything seems to be reduced to two dimensions, complexity is an uncomfortable concept. Yet Gabriella Ambrosio embraces it in her latest book, Aprile è una strana stagione.
Diva e Donna, 28.04.26
Aprile è una strana stagione unfolds at the same impetuous pace that marks the days of its protagonist (…), a figure with a thirst for life, eager to be part of the flow of events with an unceasing curiosity about what is happening to him. An indomitable and unclassifiable character.
la Repubblica, 01.06.26
The prose itself – vibrant and defiant of convention – goes along with this perpetual motion, acting as a mirror to a soul fleeing from labels and transforming ambiguity into an instrument of pure, powerful resistance.
MilleLibri, 19.06.26
The very title, Aprile è una strana stagione, transposes the harshness of the first line of the famous English poem and transports it into a realm of estrangement, of strangeness, of a slight shift in the perception of reality. (…The protagonist) … breaks free from the constraints imposed by the body, by emotional ties, and by sexual morality. Yet without going too far or turning into a modern Dionysus, nor even a titillating fetish: his is a melancholic realisation that no form is definitive.
il manifesto, 26.06.26