The fifteen short prose pieces in Betrayals delineate the story of a young English man living in northern Italy between Ivrea and Turin in the 1980s. The story is a follow-up and a rewriting of Italian Lessons (Like This Press, 2017) that has a different tone and is from a different perspective. Betrayals is a rethinking that meditates on the perception of relationships in a more personal way. The short prose pieces look like chapters that trace chronologically the Italian experience which is centred on the protagonist’s job as an English teacher in a high school and on his relationship with his Italian lover, Donatella.

The relationship starts as an occasional encounter in a discotheque in an atmosphere ofdéjà-vuthat mimics movies’ romantic scenes:

Her eyes caught mine; she smiled with a strange mixture of shyness and cheekiness. She held out her glass to me. I wasn’t sure I…