The Italian writer Marco Missiroli knew he had struck a nerve with his new novel about marital infidelity when the messages started popping up on social media. “I put readers at a crossroads where they were forced to see the dark side of their marriage and many didn’t like it,” he says. “People said the novel wounded them. Others wrote, ‘How can you enter into my marriage like that and insinuate I am unfaithful?’ ”
A best-seller in Italy that is being filmed for Netflix, Fidelity is out in an international English-language edition next month, so American and British readers will get the chance to find out how red in the face it makes them — and Missiroli has little doubt it will. “I imagine someone reading it in England will say, ‘This would be me if I was Italian.’ ”
