The Dialect
of Touch

Between knowing and understanding.

Marco Orsini was twenty-four when he left Florence. He carried a camera, a suitcase, and a head crowded with the voices of great writers. He believed that somewhere between their pages lay a truth capable of explaining love, loneliness, desire, beauty, and the strange ache of being alive.

Raised among beauty and fluent in borrowed truths, Marco moves through Russia, Japan, India, Turkey, Jordan, Morocco, America, and Spain, testing what literature has promised him against the people and places he encounters.

What begins as a journey around the world becomes something far more personal: a private diary of the distance between knowing and understanding, between being touched and truly feeling, between the stories we inherit and the lives we eventually write for ourselves.

Through desire, friendship, private failure, silence, betrayal, and moments of startling tenderness, his notebook becomes a confession of the selves he performs, the truths he avoids, and the man he is slowly becoming. The Dialect of Touch is an intimate literary novel about desire, distance, literature, and the difficult art of becoming honest.