Nicola Lagioia

Italy’s most critically acclaimed contemporary novelist, Nicola Lagioia has won the 2015 Strega Prize, the Volponi, Straniero, and Viareggio literary awards. In 2010 he was named one of Italy’s best writers under 40 and is a jury member of the Venice Film Festival and the program director of the 2017 Turin Book Fair.

Nicola’s English language debut, Ferocity, combines suspense, contemporary realism and a fierce Mediterranean vision. At once an intimate family saga and a cinematic portrait of the moral and political corruption of an entire society, Ferocity is an ambitious, gripping work. On a stifling summer’s night, on the outskirts of a southern Italian metropolis, a young woman named Clara stumbles naked, dazed, and bloodied down a major highway. Her death is labeled a suicide. Her estranged half-brother, however, cannot free himself from her memory or the questions surrounding her passing, and the more he learns about Clara’s life, the more he uncovers the moral decay at the core of his family’s ascent to social prominence.

Translated from the Italian by Antony Shugaar and available in English for the first time, Ferocity is part ecological thriller, part murder mystery.