Hello and welcome to Meet the Writers, I'm Georgina Godwin.
My guest today is a novelist and translator
whose work often explores family, memory and the feeling of living between cultures.
Born to an English mother and an Italian father, he grew up between England, France
and Italy, experiences that have shaped both his life and his writing.
His debut novel, The Water Breather, won the Authors Club Best First Novel Award,
followed by The Incomplete Husband, a story of migration, identity and belonging.
Alongside his fiction, he worked internationally on education and development projects for UNESCO,
and he's also a literary translator from French and Italian to English.
Now, nearly 20 years after his last book, he returns with other people's children.
It follows Tommaso, a man caught between caring for his elderly grandmother in London
and trying to build a life with his partner and her two sons.
As family tensions grow, long-buried secrets from wartime Italy begin to surface.
Ben Faccini, welcome to Meet the Writers.
Thank you very much for having me.
This is such a lovely book and you just need to look at the back cover to see how much it's appreciated
at sentence level by other writers, how beautifully and elegantly it's been constructed.
And I want to get into that a little bit later on.
But first, let's just start off with your influences, because, of course, you had all these competing cultures.
It was England, France and Italy.