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Rome… Two novels that converse, telling the stories of two families grappling with a shared grief, and their poignant struggle to find a way back to life. All the Life That Remains and I Who Loved You So Much, authored by Roberta Recchia and published by Rizzoli, are now being developed by Lotus Production, a LeoneFilm Group company.
All the Life That Remains, Roberta Recchia's debut novel – a success with 200,000 copies sold and translated into 17 countries, which left a profound mark on the Italian publishing landscape – is an intimate, cathartic novel about shame and dignity, about the collapse and rebirth of an Italian family grappling with a dramatic loss: that of a daughter brutally murdered on the Lazio coast.
I Who Loved You So Much, the second novel, on the bestseller list since its publication in May 2025, revisits that trauma from another perspective: that of the killer's family, giving voice to those who find themselves "on the wrong side of grief."
A story that expands the narrative universe of the first novel, confirming the author's sensitivity and narrative power.
SYNOPSIS
All the Life That Remains: Rome. 1950s. Marisa and Stelvio Ansaldo fall in love in the workshop of Ettore, Marisa's father. They seem destined for a happy life, an ordinary life, but a full one. A life that is shattered, however, when their beloved sixteen-year-old daughter Betta is murdered on the Lazio coast, and with her, Marisa and Stelvio lose a part of themselves. No one imagines, though, that along with Betta, on the beach, was also her cousin Miriam, who, shy and introverted, also a victim of violence impossible to recount, decided not to confide that terrible secret to anyone. A secret that year after year erodes the life of the surviving cousin, a chasm into which only Leo, a young man from the outskirts, capable of bringing an unexpected light into Miriam's life, manages to peer.
I Who Loved You So Much: Luca is fourteen and possesses an extraordinary sensitivity. He lives on the Lazio coast with his parents and older brother, spending the months waiting for summer to return, and with it, the vibrant girl he's fallen in love with: Betta. When she disappears, however, the police knock on his door, and Luca's life changes forever. To save him from the avalanche about to engulf his family, his mother sends him north, to the home of his uncle Umberto, a high school teacher, and aunt Mara, where he will live with his cousins. It's a distant and different world, one in which Luca must try to live again and rediscover a sense of trust and belonging.
The project is currently in creative development.
Further details will be announced in the coming months.
