Having very much enjoyed her previous two novels translated into English A Girl Returned (my review) and A Sister’s Story (my review), I jumped at the chance to read her latest, winner of the 2024 Strega Prize, a novel inspired by a historic true-crime event in the 90’s, a double femicide in the mountainous region of the Abruzzo Apennines in Italy, a novel dedicated to “all the women who survive”.

Brittle or Fragile, the Impact of Events

When the novel opens, its first three chapters, just over a page each, touch on everything to come, Lucia’s daughter Amanda who has returned from Milan on one of the last trains as the pandemic shuts everything down, she stays in her room, barely eats, doesn’t talk, her phone uncharged under the bed. Lucia worries but can get nothing out of her.

Lucia visits her elderly widowed father, who lives in the house she was born, halfway between the town and the mountain. They walk up there and he reminds her all this will be hers one day too, land he owns that he no longer wants responsibility for.

An alarm signal arises from my stomach to my throat, suffocating me.
“That’s impossible. You sold this land.”
He tried for a long time, he confesses, without success.
I’m silent for a while, in the chorus of birds. At regular intervals the cuckoo solos.
“After what happened no one wanted it, I couldn’t give it away,” he says, as if to justify himself.
“I don’t want it either, it’s a frightening place.”
I’ve raised my voice, the last syllables echo. It will be mine of necessity, I’m his only heir.

Eighteen months before, the excitement of her daughter’s departure for Milan, the city where life would open up and happen for her, a grandfather’s pride. Now in quarantine, returned and nothing like that ambitious young woman that had left.

The Present Awakens the Past

Amanda’s reclusiveness awakens Lucia’s memories of those events of 30 years ago and throughout the novel, we learn not only what happened, but of the guilt Lucia carries for her absence and the heaviness that surviving the tragedy cost her friend, who, to make a better life left the place that held those terrible memories.

She doesn’t want to be seen in the town, people said of her, after the crime. No one mentions her anymore now. They’ve all forgotten Doralice and her story. The young people of Amanda’s age never knew her. Our parents didn’t help us stay connected.

With the memories come scenes that depict generational ways of living, ways of being, some things that stay the same, the things that change, the reasons some stay, while others leave.

Lucia recalls trying not to worry about her daughter in the city alone, allowing her her freedom, throwing herself into her work to stop herself taking the train after her. But now she questions whether she underestimated the impact of something that happened to her.

I consoled her as well as I could, from a distance. That time, I really was wrong not to get on a train. Respecting her freedom, I failed her when she needed me. Some boundaries are too subtle for an indecisive mother like me. But do the most stable parents know at every moment the truth of what to do?
“Don’t worry, it will pass,” and I believed her.

Although the story is about a crime, the mystery of what happens sits alongside the portrait of a fractured family and community, all impacted by the past, burying it with silence.

Our birthplace had protected us for a long time, or maybe that had been a false impression. We grew up in a single night.

The return of Amanda, interest in the mountain property from a developer and a need for resolution, ultimately brings the community together in an act that will work to heal wounds and create momentum for a new era.

The novel is told in five parts: Amanda, The Girls, Dente del Lupo, The Flight, and The Concert in short chapters, going back and forth in time, revealing aspects of the past of Amanda (recent) and her mother (long ago), while witnessing the changed state of their present and their dual need for healing.

The slow reveal of the tragic murders, alongside understanding how it impacted our narrator, plus her own awakening to the effect of that suppressed event, from the safer distance of 30 years in the future, is skillfully blended with the present day psychological suffering of her daughter, as they move towards recovering.

I thought this was so well portrayed, blending the mystery of tragic events, with inter-generational trauma and present day personal struggles, facing the difficulty of breaking through patterns of silence and repression, of deep caring even without understanding, of the need to forgive oneself and the dedicated perseverance of familial maternal love.

Highly Recommended.

N.B. Thank you to Europa Editions UK for sending me a copy of the novel for review.

Author, Donatella Di Pietrantonio

Donatella Di Pietranonio lives in Penne, Abruzzo, where she practices as a pediatric dentist. She began publishing books in 2011, at the age of 49. In the span of a little more than a decade, she has come to the attention of Italian critics and readers, winning the Campiello Prize with her third novel L’Arminuta (A Girl Returned) in 2017. A Sister’s Story was shortlisted for the prestigious Strega Prize and The Brittle Age the 2024 winner of the Strega and Strega Youth Prize. Her short fiction has been published by Granta Italy.