“I have dreamed of writing this incredible and completely true story ever since my father told it to me as a child,” says Arturo Perez-Reverte about the novel “The Italian,” which sold several hundred thousand copies in the author’s homeland . The true story of the Italian frogmen who sank fourteen British ships - the story of individuals triumphing over a powerful war machine against all odds - had been told differently for many years: Italians had traditionally been portrayed as clueless cowards, and Perez-Reverte wanted to bring justice. Italy was an ally of Germany in World War II, but this does not bother him: “In my novels, the boundary between hero and villain is always arbitrary. My characters could end up on either side. Heroes are always ambiguous. And whoever does not understand this, let him go to the devil.” Arturo Perez-Reverte is a former military journalist, renowned author of brilliant historical, military, and adventure novels translated into forty languages, creator of the series about Captain Diego Alatriste, winner of the most prestigious literary awards. His new novel is a story of personal valor: the courage of Italian divers who carried out daring operations in Gibraltar, and the courage of one Spanish woman, the owner of a bookstore, who recognized these people as heroes in the classical, bookish sense of the word, wanted to fight alongside them and turned into a modern Nausicaa for Ulysses who emerged from the darkness of the waters. “The Italian” is a dizzying military thriller, a hymn to the Mediterranean, an incredible story of love and fearlessness in the face of hopeless circumstances, a novel about heroism on any side of the front line. For the first time in Russian!