A terminally ill woman dying in a hospital in Redondo Beach, California. A Colombian teenage girl who has to face an extreme test alone. A young Welsh physicist and rugby player who has to take up service at CERN, in Geneva. A Sicilian boy on a very risky mission in the North. A disillusioned postal worker and dull family man in the Soviet Union. A Chinese thief waiting to serve her sentence. A young Australian Aboriginal becoming a man. The lives of these seven people, who have never met or known each other and live thousands of miles apart, are united by a common destiny with an eighth man: their story in fact culminates on the day of John F. Kennedy’s murder in Dallas. Precisely then, each of them faces the ultimate meaning of their existence in a personal yet shared moment, while life does not stop, and the world goes on as it does every day…

Carlo Musso was born in Rome, Italy, in 1966, where he lives with his wife and son. Graduated in Physics, he was a researcher at the Institute of Cosmic Physics in Milan and served at the Italian Space Agency. Carlo is currently a manager in a multinational aerospace and defence company. He is a member of the Istituto Affari Internazionali, Chatham House and the NATO Defense College Foundation. For many years, he was a regular collaborator of the Italy-US Fulbright Commission. Carlo has published five novels in Italian and written several short stories, both in Italian and English.

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If the date November 22, 1963 means something to you, it’s likely because you remember finding out that the 35th president of the United States, John Fitzgerald Kennedy (also called JFK), had been assassinated during a promenade in the presidential motorcade. While that moment is cemented in the minds of many who were alive to receive the news, lives had to continue on that day. The culmination of Greenwich Meridian by Carlo Musso takes place on that same day and explores the lives of seven people who, unknowingly, are interconnected with each other. Throughout the series of vignettes that make up Greenwich Meridian, Musso has woven in JFK’s possible perspective. Greenwich Meridian has a refreshing structure. Often works that follow multiple characters have each chapter labeled with the character of focus’s name. However, Musso simply numbers each vignette and has subsections that detail when and where that portion of the story is taking place. While some may not prefer this as readers are not set up right away to know whose perspective they’re jumping into, I did prefer this structure. The vignette numbering system—although subdivided—allowed the book (for me) to flow more as one cohesive story than other multi-perspective works I’ve read in the past. I recognize this is a subjective preference, but I genuinely did appreciate how Musso was able to connect the seven fictional characters as well as JFK into one story. As with any book with multiple loci, there are going to be some that readers find themselves connecting with more than others. For me, I was most drawn to the stories of Maddalena and Mei Li. Maddalena is in Cartagena de Indias in Colombia. A reflective teenager who feels no longer a child, but, as an adult reader, I know she is not fully grown either—Maddalena is faced with taking a definitive action for her future alone. Musso’s prose for Maddalena felt especially intricate and insightful to me. That style, along with Maddalena’s predicament (I’m being intentionally vague so as not to spoil anything) put the character in a special place in my heart. Mei Li is in Dongguan in China. I felt that Musso’s prose for her was especially visceral. This does mean, however, that readers may find themselves squeamish as Musso describes Mei Li’s prison cell. You see, a desperate act on Mei Li’s part has landed her in prison with the ultimate fate hanging over her head. The impending danger along with Musso’s aforementioned vivid prose gave me a kind of desperate hope as a reader that, somehow, things would work out for her. I do want to highlight that, as Musso notes at the end of the work, the seven characters who are not JFK are fictional, but some of them do have grounded inspirations from Musso’s life. For the characters that were not grounded so, Musso sought out information so he could write authentically. Additionally, while JFK’s inner thoughts are clearly also fictional, Musso did do some notable research to learn what JFK was doing in his final hours. I wanted to highlight all of this because I think it highlights how considerate, measured, and thoughtful of an author Musso is. Greenwich Meridian by Carlo Musso follows stories of seven characters, scattered across the world, who have their own perplexing and poignant predicaments on November 22, 1963. Unbeknownst to them, their fates are tied together by the US president about to meet an untimely end. While readers will likely connect with some characters more than others, this is just (in my experience) the nature of having an ensemble of main characters. Furthermore, the structure of Greenwich Meridian allows Musso’s carefully crafted characters’ chronicles to intermingle into one.