A press release from Book Trade Announcements:

The Divided Lands, a new unprecedented YA dystopian trilogy by Francesco Gungui, recalling the great Dante Alighieri’s Comedy afterworld and mingling romance and dystopia in a new exciting setting, with the first powerful novel, Inferno, already completed, has been sold at auction in a high five-figure three-book deal to the new YA imprint to be launched by major group RCS/Fabbri Editori.

Piergiorgio Nicolazzini at PNLA has concluded the deal on behalf of the author and handles World and dramatic rights on the property. A massive launch has been planned and a huge interest is being generated at the Bologna Children’s Book Fair with offers coming in from several countries.

“What would you be ready to do to save the person you love? Would you be ready to go through Hell…?

If you are born in Europe, the huge city-nation of the near future, only two possibilities are open to you: to get by doing dangerous or lowly jobs or succeed in finding work in Paradise, the area where the rich live in wanton luxury and can enjoy unspoilt nature. But if you steal or kill or even only question authority, prison awaits on a volcanic island far from civilisation: HELL. Constructed to reproduce the Hell that Dante imagined in his Divine Comedy, here every crime has its appropriate punishment. Showers of fire, rivers of lava and monstrous animals make life horrendous for the prisoners, who often die before completing their sentence. Nobody would choose to go to Hell voluntarily, except Luca, a young man who grew up in the wrong part of the world, when he discovers that the girl he loves, Maj, has been sent there under a false accusation. Luca will have to do what nobody has ever succeeded in doing before, escaping with her from HELL, fighting for survival, before the person who plotted to kill them both can find them…

Francesco Gungui was born in Milano in 1980. This is his most ambitious YA fiction project to date.