The Opposite of Lizards

“In life you must measure your steps, adjust your rhythm, and try to keep your balance at all times: just like riding a bike.”

Dinard, Breton Coast, 1948. It is the legendary July when Gino Bartali crisscrosses France one energetic push on his pedal at a time, and brings to Italy a glorious dream- like state. One of the technicians who is following the champion is Zaro Checcacci, a young mechanic, from – just like Ginettaccio” – Ponte a Ema. Under a foreign French sky, in the euphoria of a stage won right at the finish line, Zaro meets Lena, a waitress who is only fifteen years old. Nine months later, Isabelle will be born.
Ponte a Ema, 1959. At the bicycle shop of Zaro, who is by now married and the father of a young child named Nanni, Lena and ten year-old Isabelle show up unexpectedly. Zaro will never recognize her as his daughter, nonetheless Isabelle and Nanni will establish a strong relationship as siblings.
Twenty years later, while the wind of student protests blows, Isabelle is a young woman who survived her difficult childhood and has now given birth to two little girls, destined carry in themselves the traces of the story that precedes them …
Told in reverse order, from the present day to the night when it all began, this novel evolves within the story of four generations; The story of a meticulous family in which the laws governing the bonds between fathers and children, mothers and daughters, have been subverted since the beginning, setting the stage for the uneven destinies of mismatched couples and abandoned daughters, but also for passionate loves and stories of bicycles, and of animals, of dreams handed down like treasures.

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