Raw and poignant, The Scent of the Wolf is a coming-of-age story of courage and rebirth, drawn from real-life experience. Silvia is a teenage girl who turns the fear and darkness of childhood abuse by her father’s friend into strength and light.

1970s, Italy. Seventeen and isolated, Silvia has stopped speaking and barely eats. She has tried so hard to live her adolescence like everyone else – with first loves, friendships and school – but nothing feels right. Someone stole her voice, turning her daily life into a maze of secrets, survival strategies, and silence. In a doctor’s office, she finally meets someone who listens, someone who asks the right questions. This encounter brings her back to a summer by the lake, when everything began: when the greedy, corrupt hands of her father’s friend, the wolf-man, first crossed the boundaries of her eleven-years-old innocence, defiling it. To everyone else, Silvia seems strong and well-behaved, even when she mentions to her mother that something destroyed her. The secret stays buried between them, because both family and society seem incapable of protecting or accepting such pain. Silvia learns to live with her trauma, weaving it into a fragile web of images and metaphors that keep it away. But as she grows from a child into a young woman, her refusal to remain a victim forces her to tear down the walls she built to survive, and to trust those who can read her scars and truly listen to her story.

A powerful, intense novel of hidden wounds, of parents who fail to protect, that gives voice to those who struggle to survive and try to rebuild their lives after trauma. For surviving evil – and emerging whole – is an extraordinary adventure, one that deserves to be told.

pp.192