'It's not surprising that this short novel became a bestseller in Italy, France and Germany ... The House in Via Manno is an utterly charming and beguiling story about the nature of love and passion; it's a novel of rare and simple beauty.'

Mark Rubbo, Managing Director of Readings (Readings Monthly)

'The strikingly drawn characters, the unforced and graceful narrative voice, the postwar Sardinian setting, and the genuine surprises throughout and especially at the end, all combine to make this wholly original novel a bittersweet pleasure to read.'

Lorien Kaye (The Age)

'Charming, romantic and entrancing, it's easy to see why it is a bestseller in Europe.'

(Australian Women's Weekly)

'This is a brief and beautiful story of a Sardinian family in the years after World War II, told through the eyes of a grandchild and focusing mainly on the lovely but eccentric Nonna ... It is suggestive of the colourful and myth-infused prose of magic realism but it stays well within the boundaries of the everyday while at the same time making the most of the beauty of its setting ... For such a little book, the novel covers an extraordinary range of subjects — love, war, music, marriage, family — with great depth of understanding.'

(Sydney Morning Herald)

'Fans of Isabel Allende and Gabriel Garcia Márquez will enjoy this heartwarming story of the loyalties and loves of a large Sardinian family set during World War II.'

(Vogue Australia)

'It is easy to fall in love with the delightfully cute book The House in Via Manno. For a start, it is set on the romantic and charming Italian island of Sardinia and features a range of charismatic characters.'

Fiona Purdon (Courier Mail)

'The House in Via Manno is lyrical and poetic, even as it faces the harsh social and economic realities of 20th-century Italy, but it also takes some surprising dips into sexuality ... A bestseller in Europe, this warm and colourful novel will appeal to fans of García Márquez.'

(The Dominion Post Weekend)

'This is like peasant food discovered by chance at the end of a rustic old laneway in a random Tuscan countryside village. Simple and honest, yet hearty and warming, delicious and memorable. It is the translation of an Italian story that has been embraced around the world for its enchanting tale of true love and family secrets.'

(West Australian)

'If you don't fall in love with the characters, you will surely be seduced by Sardinia itself — its stone villages, jewel-like bays and rocky mountains.'

Caroline Baum (Better Homes and Gardens)

'Every family has its secrets, and the ones in The House in Via Manno unwind slowly, with warmth, earthy humour and magic woven throughout ... One for the Gabriel Garcia Marquez fans, and short enough to be read on a lazy Sunday. Two thumbs up.'

(frankie magazine)

'This beautifully told story of a passionate but slightly crazy Sardinian woman was a bestseller in Europe. Married late to a refugee from the capital after the American bombing of Sardinia, Nonna is a dutiful wife who dreams of the one true love her husband can never be. She diligently duplicates the services her husband received at the bordello, so saving him money for tobacco. Agus handles the sex scenes with a lightly comic touch, weaving vignettes from Via Manno with stories from Nonna's past and of her meeting with the man she sees as the answer to her prayers. Bringing the story into the present, Agus quietly delivers her denouement, so surprising that you want to turn immediately to page one and read it all over again. FOUR STARS'

Deborah Bogle (Adelaide Advertiser)

'In the conventional sense of the novel, very little at all happens in this exquisite best-seller ... but this is not a criticism. For instead, we are offered a chance to contemplate the many choices we make throughout our lifetime, to observe the many different ways in which a human being can be happy or otherwise and how easily we can miss the joy we believe is our due.'

(Notebook Magazine)

'From the beautiful cover to its poignant last words, this is a touching and intelligent package.'

(Newcastle Herald)

'It’s unusual for the opening pages of a novel to transmit the delight of the unexpected, and even more unusual for this delight to endure and recur right through to the last sentences of the book. But it happens in Milena Agus’s Mal di pietre … A kind of short novel within a short novel, the idyll at the thermal baths for two equally gentle and mysterious characters casts a dream-like spell, with an efficacy and an assuredness worthy of Alain Fournier’s Grand Meaulnes or Nerval’s Sylvie.'

Jacqueline Risset (Il messaggero)

'These are family sagas in miniature, little diversions of the imagination lit up by real-life stories, mostly female characters struggling with the torments of love, beautiful marinas vivid with the light of a Sardinia one immediately falls in love with — this is the stuff Milena Agus’s beautiful stories are made of.'

Michele De Mieri (l’Unità)

Mal di pietre 'oscilliates between mythical fable (the dominant feature of the book) and straightforward entertaining realism, capable of masking or transforming suffering and turning it into pure storytelling for its own sake. Colour and warmth that remind us of García Márquez, combined with the flourish — born of an uncommon capacity for invention – of the unforeseen and utterly surprising ending, which leaves a bit of a bad taste in your mouth, and yet which presents us once more with that mix of reality and imagination, of concrete and illusory worlds, that is our existence.'

Giovanni Pacchiano (Il sole 24 ore)