On Earth as It Is in Heaven

A dark, gripping coming-of-age tale that explores friendship and family, love and betrayal, masculinity and violence.


In the early 1980s Mafia gang wars are tearing the precariously stitched-together city of Palermo apart. A fatherless nine-year-old boy climbs into a boxing ring to face his first opponent.


Davide Enia's sweeping multigenerational saga reaches back to World War II and forward to talented young David's quest to become a champion boxer for his country, a feat that has eluded the other men in his family.


A sensation when published in Italy in 2012, On Earth as It Is in Heaven is at once an intimate account of Sicilian life and devastatingly universal.


Davide Enia was born in 1974 in Palermo. He has written, directed and performed in plays for the stage and radio. On Earth as It Is in Heaven, his first novel, has been translated into eighteen languages. Davide lives and cooks in Rome.


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'[Davide Enia] talks to his reader and he lets his characters talk, characters who at times are pure voice, resounding at length. We've not only read his protagonists, we've listened to them, smelled them. They're not made of paper; they jump from the pages of this novel. A boy is a pair of fists and an excess of timidity; a girl is all looks and things left unsaid...On Earth As it Is in Heaven is an experience: you have to live it. A coming-of-age novel that's not at all traditional, it contains so much: war, boxing, love, sensuality, humor, friendship, death.' Elle (Italy)


'A feint, a dodge, a strike, you back away and then you land the decisive punch. As entertaining as a bout, as powerful as a direct hit: a book that leaves you breathless like a punch in the gut...Enia, a man of the theater as well as music, tells - in a language that's sometimes like ballet sometimes like hand-to-hand combat, fraught and graceful by turns - the sentimental and pugilistic education of a young native of Palermo in the nineties...A carnal book, full of sweat, and punches and blood and violence: the petty violence of the streets and the serious violence of the Mafia, always in the background. Enia strikes and leaves a mark.'Gioia