Some error occured while loading the Quick View. Please close the Quick View and try reloading the page.
A searing coming-of-age novel about an ordinary boy’s descent into extremism.
“With crystalline clarity and chilling tenderness, The Wrong Side portrays a boy’s fascination with violence through the lens of adolescent enchantment—driven not by hatred or rebellion but by a fragile search for meaning.”—Vincenzo Latronico, author of Perfection
Milan, early 2000s. Ettore is fourteen years old, quiet, and unremarkable—the kind of boy nobody worries about. But when he leaves the suburbs for a prestigious high school in the city, the world he enters feels vast, chaotic, and impenetrable. Surrounded by strangers and stripped of familiar reference points, he struggles to navigate the invisible hierarchies that seem to govern everything: confidence, popularity, masculinity. Then he meets Giulio—charismatic, politically radicalized, and part of a fringe neofascist group that offers exactly what Ettore lacks: structure, identity, and purpose.
What begins as curiosity slowly hardens into commitment. Drawn into an increasingly extremist world, Ettore finds not only companionship but a seductive sense of certainty that transforms his confusion into conviction. Step by step, almost imperceptibly, he crosses thresholds from which there may be no easy return.
Told with intimate urgency and psychological precision, The Wrong Side is both a chilling portrait of radicalization and a tender, unsettling exploration of male loneliness, vulnerability, and the desperate need to belong—of what it means to be a boy who cannot yet name what he’s searching for, and who finds the wrong answer first.
“Why do people become fascists when they’re so young and everything is still in one piece?”
"Reading this book is like seeing yourself in a new mirror: the same reflection, the same adolescence everyone experiences, but slightly distorted—where something has gone wrong. To dwell on that 'something' feels more urgent than ever."—Internazionale
"Written in clear, flowing prose that reads almost like a memoir, The Wrong Side stages a dramatic fragment in a boy's life without judgment or moralizing, allowing readers to look from the inside at a choice shaped equally by fear and hatred. A tender and powerful novel that helps us better understand a world that is all around us but that we often struggle to see clearly."—Il manifesto
"Measured, profound, incisive. An outstanding debut that asks a simple question: how does a fourteen-year-old become a fascist? With a gaze that blends violence and tenderness in equal measure, the novel follows the protagonist's reckless journey toward its tragic outcome."—Il Messaggero
"Tender, intelligent, well-written, and sharply timely…the flare signal of a national failure."—Corriere della Sera
"It had been years since I'd read an Italian novel written this well—so balanced in its structure, so meticulous in its choice of every word, so pared down to the essential. A rare novel written with extreme care."—Il Post