Chiara Barzini's Desert Island Books

This week’s Desert Island Books is such a detailed, juicy one, I’m going to keep my intro brief. My guest is Chiara Barzini, an Italian writer best known for her semi-autobiographical novel Things That Happened Before the Earthquake set in Los Angeles’s San Fernando Valley in the early 1990s. I came to her writing—as I often do with books—thanks to Joanna Rakoff, who said Chiara’s latest book, Aqua, was one of her favourites of the year so far: ‘An unclassifiable bit of genius, from the author of Things that Happened Before the Earthquake, one of my all-time favourite novels. Part memoir, part travelougue, part cultural criticism. Reminiscent of Didion, Dederer and other greats.’

The book came about after a road trip Chiara took with her two best friends, Ruby and Kate, along the Los Angeles Aqueduct—a journey that changed her life. As she puts it: ‘I wrote a book about the relationship between Los Angeles and its stolen waters. It snowballed into a larger hybrid project about the end of abundance,…