Award-winning Italian writer Donatella Di Pietrantonio made her English-language debut with the lauded A Girl Returned, deftly translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein (best known for her elegant Elena Ferrante translations). Author and translator return to the characters from their earlier collaboration with A Sister’s Story, another simmering, intense novel of dysfunctional relationships and destructive secrets that proves equally strong as a companion sequel or standalone title.
A literature professor at the University of Grenoble is pulled from her class to answer an urgent phone call. An unfamiliar voice urges her immediately back to coastal Pescara, Italy, where a terrible accident has befallen her younger sister, Adriana. Narrating the journey home, toward a fraught sororal reunion, the protagonist--writing intimately in first person, ignoring temporal linearity--reveals years of complications and connections shared (and not), especially between sisters.
Adriana and the narrator are the only daughters among five (living) children in a struggling, combative, working-class family. The narrator, however, was raised by an aunt and uncle in "the city," and for much of their lives, Adriana "has never been tactful, she interjects herself into everything that has to do with me as if it were also hers," the narrator observes.
Di Pietrantonio radiantly conjures small, piercing moments that linger between characters, turning sparsely written pages into surprisingly dense examinations of resonating reactions and enduring consequences: a fish Adriana expertly guts and cooks, a tiny mosquito in a gelato shop, an errant hair mixed into tagliatelle. Her sharp examinations haunt and illuminate, transforming the quotidian into the indelibly literary. --Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon