The books of dialogue

Not Perfect, But Happy
by Brother MichaelDavide
San Paolo, 2025
This new revised and updated edition continues a broad and engaging reflection on what it means to be consecrated today, in a time of vocational crisis and ecclesial transformation. Consecrated life is not a search for perfection, but for truth: these pages unmask every temptation to narrow one's identity or spiritual aestheticization, addressing highly topical issues such as emotional solitude, vocational sterility, the aging of religious institutes, and the need for new forms of presence in the world. These challenges challenge consecrated life to radically rethink itself as an open threshold. Based on "Paschal realism," a spiritual posture that does not deny the crisis but navigates it in the light of Christ's Passover, the book speaks to all those who are searching and who, inside or outside the Church, aspire to a way to be in the world with freedom, compassion, and generativity.

A Guide to Middle Eastern Politics
by Elvira Mujčić
Guanda 2025
In the electric atmosphere of 1990 Yugoslavia, two young people return to their town in eastern Bosnia. Nene is an artist obsessed with the possibility that his country might suddenly cease to exist. Merima, her schoolmate, believes in politics, in the dream of "brotherhood and unity" among peoples, and tries to counter the stormy winds blowing through the country, hoping in this way to distract herself from a broken heart. And then there's Eliza, Merima's daughter, an eight-year-old girl planning a trip to visit the father she has never met and from whom she has only a birthday card. The author, who was a child like Eliza during the Yugoslav wars, recounts the individual destinies through which the destiny of an entire country unfolds, driven by the same dreams as its protagonists.

Aurora Antonucci
NP December 2025