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WINNER OF THE 2020 YOUTH STREGA PRIZE
From one of the most exciting voices in a new generation of Italian writers, a powerful and moving novel that explores both the darkest recesses and the most luminous regions of the human heart
June 1994. Twenty-year-old Daniele wakes up in a hospital room, confused and surrounded by strangers. Slowly, memories of the previous night return to him: a spiral of anxiety and anger, an explosion of violence so intense that it almost inflicted irreparable damage to him and his family… To his horror, Daniele learns from the doctors that he’s been sentenced to a week of mandatory treatment in a psychiatric ward.
Writing with lucid realism and stunning emotional force, and drawing from the author's own personal experience of mental illness, Mencarelli chronicles Daniele’s seven days in the hospital as he struggles to find a way out of the darkness. Daniele finds unexpected companions in his fellow patients—men who, like him, have felt the full brunt of life’s pain. Together they will realize the hidden strength and value of their common fragility and of the boundless empathy they feel towards others.
By focusing on some of the most marginalized people in our society, Mencarelli has written a heartbreaking and unforgettable novel that challenges our notion of normality and celebrates the salvific power of solidarity and vulnerability.
“A young Italian man is involuntarily committed to a psychiatric ward in Mencarelli’s evocative work of autofiction, his English-language debut... Mencarelli captures Daniele’s muddled emotional state—a blend of shame, confusion, and chafing at restrictions—in powerful, compact scenes. With its bracing view of the hero’s interior world, this meditative novel viscerally excoriates the failings of his treatment.”—Publishers Weekly
“Moving and engaging. This novel will stay with you.”—Goffredo Fofi, Internazionale
“Mencarelli writes with the grace and power of a poet. His words illuminate truth like a flash of lightning.”—Il Sole 24 Ore
“Mencarelli’s writing is extraordinary for its intensity and empathy… His prose has the emotional force of poetry.”—Radio Tre