An exuberant tale of a man caught between faith and freedom, from one of Italy’s most talented young novelists

Thirty years old, growing flabby in a sexless marriage, Piero Rosini has decided to dedicate his life to Jesus. Novels and music were filling his head with bullshit; his bourgeois life in a fancy neighborhood had taken him far away from spiritual purity and the Lord’s truth. So he’s moved to an unfinished housing development on the outskirts of Rome and thrown himself into his work at an ultraconservative Catholic publishing house, editing books that highlight the decadence and degradation of modern society, including a book claiming that Pope John Paul II was secretly Jewish.

But Piero is suffocating. He worries that The Jewish Pope might be taking things too far. He can’t get his beautiful sister-in-law out of his head. Temptations (both physical and intellectual) are breaking down his religious resolve. He decides to flee to Paris, which turns out not to be the best way of guarding his purity.

With a charismatic narrator who is as familiar with the finer points of theology as he is with the floor layout of IKEA and the workings of budget airlines, Francesco Pacifico’s exuberant novel brings us Europe old and new and the inner workings of a conflicted but always compelling mind. The Story of My Purity is fiction with great humor, intelligence, and vision, from a young writer at the beginning of a tremendous career.