Ferocity

By Nicola Lagioia

A combination of Gone Girl and Franzen’s Freedom filtered through the fierce Mediterranean vision of Elena Ferrante

Southern Italy, the 1980s. On a hot summer’s night under a full moon, far from the outlying neighbourhoods of a southern Italian city, Clara stumbles naked, dazed, and bloodied down a major highway. When she dies no-one is able to say exactly how or why, but her brother cannot free himself from her memory or from the questions surrounding her death. The more he learns about her life and death, the more he uncovers the moral decay at the core of his family’s ascent to social prominence.
At once an intimate family saga, a history of an entire region, and a portrait of the moral and political corruption of a whole society, Ferocity is a cinematic suspense novel that addresses vital social questions.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Europa Editions
• Release date: Oct 12, 2017
• ISBN: 9781787700192

Nicola Lagioia

One of Italy’s most critically acclaimed contemporary novelists, Nicola Lagioia has been the recipient of the Volponi, Straniero, and Viareggio awards, in addition to the Strega. In 2010 he was named one of Italy’s best writers under forty. He has been a jury member of the Venice Film Festival and is the program director of the Turin Book Fair. Lagioia is a contributor to Italy’s most prominent culture pages. He was born in Bari, and lives in Rome. Ferocity is his English-language debut.

Reviews for Ferocity

[devilish2 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

An elliptical, lyrical exploration of family, corruption and living in southern Italy. The translation was not the best but the writing still shone through.A naked woman is run over in the night. Clara is found dead after jumping off a multi-storey car park. Her brother Michele starts asking questions and examining himself and his family.

[lunarreader · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Oops, a special one. Won the Premio Strega. Compared to the greatest. But confusing. Very confusing.I did read some hundred pages and then i stopped for a week or two, due to professional duties. I had to restart. All over. The book turns and twists, in time, in narrating character, in point of view, in writing style. Back and forth, switching until even the cat tells her part. One thing's for sure: you have to be awake. Very well awake. The story then. It could've been grasping and intriguing. But it's not, or not enough. Not to me. An entrepreneur in Italy, in the south, the mezzogiorno. Corrupt? Or obliged to be? Wreckens all, and everyone. Untill it is too much. Also for the reader. Too many characters, too many viewpoints, parts of stories unfinished, left in the open. As a mystery? As if nothing ever really ends? Unclear.And the lives of the characters. I never felt connected. With not one of them. The entrepreneur has children with his wife and one with a romance. The wife .... never really clear what to think of her. Typically upperclass Italian? I wouldn't know. The children: a brilliant doctor with a handicapped career, a stunning beauty in to hardcore sex and violence, a psychotic boy trying to be a journalist (or not really?) and a younger daughter keeping her dead stunning beauty sister - semi prostitute alive on Twitter.The violence, the corruption, the drugs, .... all so far away to me. If life in Bari is like this, it's hell. But who knows? The ones who live there? Really? Even that seems hard to imagine to me.But the writing itself is excellent, i kept reading as you do want to know how it will end, the style of some sentences is that nice, that you want to reread them, and that you can only wonder about the musicality it has without doubt in the authors native language. And because of this beautiful style i give it 3 stars. Deservedly so.