At the end of the nineteenth century, as political unrest shakes the newly unified Italian nation, Amalia Spada offers refuge in the Lucanian Badlands to brigands resisting the state and to a band of rebellious teenagers.

In the 1950s, Ada travels to the same southern region, that of her ancestors, where vast oil reserves have been discovered. By turns translator and spy, this apprentice anthropologist is drawn to rural traditions even as they are transformed by the pursuit of black gold.

A century later, in 2056, the region has left oil behind to become the base of the Mediterranean Space Agency. From the Moon, an archivist known only as A catalogues objects that bear witness to life on Earth. Amalia Spada, Ada and A: three magnetic figures who, across different eras, offer alternative accounts of history.

At once a feminist saga, a western and a work of speculative fiction, bringing together brigands, saints, spies and astronauts, Claudia Durastanti's Missitalia is a novel of striking originality and ambition by one of Italy's most acclaimed contemporary writers.