The Brittle Age
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- USD 9.99
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- USD 9.99
Descripción editorial
Literary Hub Notable Small Press Book of 2025
Nominated for the 2026 Dublin Literary Award
Winner of the 2024 Strega Prize and the 2024 Youth Strega Prize
★ “A gut-wrenching excavation of generational trauma... this contemplative novel offers a subtle but piercing meditation on the complex dynamics between parents and children.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Acclaimed Italian author Donatella Di Pietrantonio’s best-selling novel to date, The Brittle Age is a powerful mother and daughter story and a profound exploration of human fragility and the haunting shadows of the past
In the 1990s, deep in the Maiella mountains of Central Italy, a brutal crime shatters the peace of the local community. Two young women are murdered, a third left for dead. Lucia is twenty years old back, and the only survivor is her best friend.
Now, Lucia is a physiotherapist, separating from her husband, her daughter Amanda studying in Milan. When the pandemic forces Amanda to return to the family’s home near Pescara, Lucia’s memories are reawakened, and with them the impact of past trauma.
Set against the backdrop of the rugged Apennine mountains, this gripping psychological family drama weaves Lucia and Amanda’s personal struggles with the mystery of the tragedy that marked their familial land decades earlier.
Inspired by true events, The Brittle Age is a tale of individual resilience, and a commentary on the indelible impact of historical events on personal lives and the broader community.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Di Pietrantonio (A Sister Story) offers a gut-wrenching excavation of generational trauma rooted in a 1992 double homicide in the Apennine mountains of central Italy. Lucia, a physiotherapist, has lived her whole life near the now abandoned alpine campground still owned by her father, Rocco, where the murders took place decades earlier. Her 20-year-old daughter, Amanda, has left for college in Milan, but when the Covid-19 pandemic forces her back home, she stops studying and keeps to her room. Lucia's narration shifts fluidly between past and present, as Rocco's insistence on deeding the campground to Lucia conjures memories of the murders. Lucia was 20 when two young women were raped and killed by a laborer working for one of the local shepherds. The perpetrator also nearly killed Lucia's best friend, Doralice Damiani, from whom Lucia has been estranged since the attack. As Lucia weighs her uneasy inheritance, Di Pietrantonio doles out the details of the crime, the reasons for the friends' rupture, and the cause of Amanda's withdrawal, revealing striking parallels between mother and daughter. In crystalline prose, this contemplative novel offers a subtle but piercing meditation on the complex dynamics between parents and children.
