English sample available

A quality debut novel, powerful language that bluntly narrates the lives of two frail, damaged brothers, the victims of seclusion and degradation, tortured by a sense of guilt that rules over their lives, and which they must face.

In the imaginary outskirts of a tiny Sicilian village, Antonio and Paolo, two brothers aged nineteen and twenty-two, have been living alone since their father died and their mother left home. Together, they have built an everyday routine that apparently works despite its extreme precariousness, a present in which, however, there is no room for developing future projects and they are constantly overwhelmed by the struggle for survival. It is the summer. Antonio is looking for a job and Paolo trying to keep his. Hallucinating nights with friends, parties, days spent by the sea, evenings of drink, sex and drugs. Then, one seemingly quiet day, something snaps. As though by some petty astral conspiracy, old skeletons leap out of the cupboard and shallowly buried past demons resurface: the young men’s mother returns after running away from her violent husband years earlier, an old, a dormant love comes knocking at the door of one of the brothers and crimes never atoned appear on the horizon of the other…