Literary Fiction

I tuoni

(Thunderbolts)

Ponte alle Grazie, April 2021, pp.192

On the distant outskirts of Rome, three young men are bound by a common destiny that involves exclusion, oppression, friendship, love and violence. It’s this violence – the result of their desire for release – that will inevitably lead to revolt.

In a nameless outlying district, Manuel, Andrea and Abdoulaye lead a precarious existence. They are first- and second-generation Italians with talent, aspirations and past lives they don’t talk about. For them, the city is only a backdrop, while daily life is stuck in the ruthless hierarchy of the district, where the difference between those who can cultivate their ambitions and those who are irreversibly condemned to the margins is distinct. The friendship that binds them is their only staple, at least until loves comes to break them up –love for Donatella, a seventeen-year-old whose parents have sacrificed their roots and identities in favour of an anonymous little house in a residential area that borders the district. Her anger will trigger the crackdown everyone expects. And when violence does come, it claims its victims but also grants a small glimmer of hope for salvation.

Ponte alle Grazie, April 2021, pp.192

  • “Giagni è il Pasolini di oggi”. 

    Laura Piccinini, D – La Repubblica

  • “A wonderful novel, splendid language: appropriate to a great writer.”

    Valeria Parrella, Grazia

  • “Both vivid and precise, Giagni’s prose has the rare power to make us imagine the world he describes.”

    Emanuele Trevi, Winner 2021 Strega Prize

  • “My first reaction was: what – more working-class suburbs? And yet I hadn’t read anthing like it about suburbs since Walter Siti’s Contagio.”

    Giancarlo De Cataldo, bestselling author

  • “The crystalline beauty achieved by his writing (…) if you read Giagni, the gap between writing and good writing will become very clear to you.”

    Marcello Fois, L’Espresso

  • “A dark tale, hard to forget.”

    Alessandro Zaccuri, Avvenire

  • “Few authors demonstrate from the outset such a specific, personal style and vision.”

    Rosella Postorino, ttL

  • “A style never seen before, and for good reason, since it opens onto a lucid realism that swipes away any hint of news journalism with waves of emotion and poetry.”

    Alessandro Beretta, La Lettura – Corriere della Sera

  • “Such an evidently multiethnic Roman suburb that it says goodbye to Pasolini just as it rediscovers him on a deep level.”

    Walter Siti

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Tommaso Giagni

Tommaso Giagni (1985) specialised in Contemporray History at the University “la Sapienza” in Rome. He has written for dailies and magazines, in print and online. His L’estraneo (2012) and Prima di perderti (2016) were published by Einaudi.

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