A Step Away from Life

A Step Away from Life is a novel about incompleteness, memory, and the quiet difficulty of inhabiting the world. A man looks back on his own life, moving through the decisive places of his story: childhood, illness, desire, escape, solitude, and the bonds that save or wound. Each memory becomes a threshold; each wound, an unanswered question. Calogero Gagliano tells an intimate yet universal story in which the past does not return as mere nostalgia, but as a reckoning with what has been lost, silenced, or never truly understood. At the centre of the novel is a fragile existence, marked by the need to find meaning even where life seems to have withdrawn. This is not a story of easy redemption, but a human journey through pain, reserve, solitude, and the stubborn possibility of enduring. An introspective novel for readers who appreciate contemporary literary fiction, stories of memory, survival and self-understanding, wounded characters, and a narrative voice that asks what remains when every certainty falls away.

Pages: 98, Paperback, Independently published