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If you think that Italy is only sun, sea, palm trees, sand and dolce vita, you are deeply mistaken.

Italy also has its own province, remote villages with their patriarchal system, where nothing happens for days, weeks, years, time stretches out like a thick rubber mass that sucks in, dulls, makes you lose your will, forget about ambitions and aspirations for a better life.

And what would you tell an intelligent, thoughtful eighteen-year-old boy who loves to sit over books, reads the original Greek philosophers, prepares to enter university and dreams of writing a bestseller to do in such a place? How do you live in a circle of relatives and neighbours who are dumbed down by daily petty squabbles, whose main desire is to fill their bellies, drink a glass or two, and listen to massive witticisms at the table? How to survive, not to sink, not to become stupid, not to betray your dreams?

Unfortunately, few people manage to do this. And when you do, one day you have to return to the place where your insurmountable past is waiting for you.

About all this, about the «tragedy next door» — a novel by a young Italian writer from sunny Tuscany Claudio Lagomarsini.

The book reached the final of the prestigious Strega Literary Prize 2020.