“The fragile age” is one of the books nominated for the Strega Prize. Released at the end of 2023 for Einaudi, has already achieved some success and several awards, including the Young Witch Award. With this surprising novel, inspired by true events in the late 1990s, Donatella Di Pietrantonio she confirmed her innate talent for writing and has qualified herself among the best-selling authors of the moment in Italy.
“The fragile age” by Donatella Di Pietrantonio
The synopsis of “The Fragile Age”
There is no age without fear. We are always fragile, as parents and as children, when we need to rebuild and when we don’t even know where to lay the foundations. But there is a precise moment, when we throw ourselves into the world, in which we are exposed and naked, and the world must not hurt us.
This is why Lucia, who was saved by chance one night thirty years ago, now looks at her daughter’s silence with fear. That night everyone was there at Dente del Lupo. The shepherds of the Apennines, the campsite owners, the hunters, the carabinieri. Everyone, except three girls who were no longer there.
Amanda barely catches one of the last trains and returns home, to that town near Pescara from which she had run away. One look is enough for her mother to understand that something in her has gone out: in the early days in Milan she had the lights of the city in her eyes, now she seems to just want to disappear, she locks herself in her room and almost doesn’t speak. Lucia would like to keep her safe from everything, even at the cost of suffocating her, but there is a secret that she cannot hide from her.
Under the Wolf’s Tooth, on land that belongs to their family and is now tempting for real estate speculators, you can still see the remains of a campsite where a terrible event happened many years ago. Sometimes time decides to go back: under that mountain that Lucia has always tried to forget, among the pastures and woods of her fragile age, all the threads are stretched.
Caught between the old father who is so rooted in the land and this daughter who is more stubborn than him, Lucia understands that there is a strength that runs through her. Perhaps our only legacy is our wounds.
With her rough, vibrant and profound writing, capable of making us feel the weight of a glance and the sound of an unanswered question, Donatella Di Pietrantonio touches a whole new tension in this novel.
What is the fragile age
Amanda returns home after a period living in Milan. Abruzzo, with its mountains and its dense forests, welcomes with open arms a different, dull girl. What to do? Her mother asks herself, disorientated by the presence of a daughter who has changed so much, emptied of any spark of vitality.
Reading the first pages of “The Fragile Age”, it seems to have identified the figure of Amanda as the protagonist of a delicate, difficult, fragile age, precisely, as described in the title.
And instead, reading the story, we realize how each of the three women who are the main characters in Donatella Di Pietrantonio’s work go through a particular fragile age. Grandmother, mother and granddaughter, linked by blood but also by the thread of the land that hosts them, move in search of balance despite their difficulties.
Donatella DiPietrantonio
Born in 1962, the author of “The Fragile Age” was born and raised in Arsita, in the province of Teramo. She then moved to L’Aquila and finally settled in the province of Pescara.
Graduated in Dentistry, Donatella Di Pietrantonio comes from a family of farmers who have invested so much in the future of their daughter, who today practices the profession of pediatric dentist alongside her greatest passion: that of writing.
His debut book is entitled “My mother is a river” and was published in 2011. But the greatest and most unexpected success came in 2017 with “L’Arminuta”.
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