The Duke

With The Duke, Matteo Melchiorre has crafted a taut, epic tale about the madness of power, the laws of nature and individual freedom.

With The Duke, Matteo Melchiorre has crafted a taut, epic tale about the madness of power, the laws of nature and individual freedom.

This remarkable book makes us believe that some of the reasons why we still plough our way through novels might still be alive: the thirst for adventure, the chill of the mountains, a sense of greatness slightly beyond our reach.

The Duke is the story of a feud between two men set in an Italian village in the Dolomites. The build-up of tension as the quarrel gradually escalates is electric, as each move they make turns the heat up one more notch. Anyone who’s been in a dispute will recognise the reluctance to step away from the fight. The characters that the author paints are wonderfully evocative, including many of the minor figures who form part of the village. The village itself is one of the strongest ‘characters’ and we loved the feeling of claustrophobia of the place as the narrative unfolds. Packed full of plot twists, this is storytelling at its best.

Matteo Melchiorre was born in 1981. After working as a researcher at the University of Udine, Ca’ Foscari University, and the IUAV University of Venice, he has been the director of the Library of the Museum and Historical Archive of Castelfranco Veneto since 2018. His work focuses on the economic and social history of the Middle Ages and the early modern period, as well as the history of mountains and forests. The Duke is his first novel.

Antonella Lettieri is London-based translator working into English and Italian and collaborates regularly with Foundry Editions. She was the 2023 National Centre for Writing Emerging Translator Mentee for Italian and worked with Howard Curtis. She translated Maria Grazia Calandrone’s Your Little Matter, her translations have appeared in Asymptote and she was awarded the first prize in the 2023 John Dryden Translation Competition. In 2026 Antonella won the TA First Translation Prize from the Society of Authors for her translation of Your Little Matter by Maria Grazia Calandrone, and published by Foundry Editions.