A Girl Returned

By Donatella Di Pietrantonio

Without warning or a word of explanation, an unnamed 13-year-old girl is sent away from the family she has always thought of as hers to live with her birth family: a large, chaotic assortment of individuals whom she has never met and who seem anything but welcoming. Thus begins a new life, one of struggle, conflict, especially between the young girl and her mother, and deprivation. But in her relationship with Adriana and Vincenzo, two of her newly acquired siblings, she will find the strength to start again and to build a new and enduring sense of self.

Told with an immediacy and a rare expressive intensity that has earned it countless adoring readers and one of Italy’s most prestigious literary prizes, A Girl Returned is a powerful novel rendered with sensitivity and verve by Ann Goldstein, translator of the works of Elena Ferrante. Set against the stark, beautiful landscape of Abruzzo in central Italy, this is a compelling story about mothers and daughters, about responsibility, siblings, and caregiving, pitch-perfect in Ann Goldstein’s English translation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Europa Editions
• Release date: Jul 4, 2019
• ISBN: 9781787701779

Donatella Di Pietrantonio

Born in Teramo Province, Abruzzo, Donatella Di Pietrantonio completed her studies in the provincial capital, Aquila, and now lives in Penne. Her short fiction has been published by Granta Italy, and her novel, Bella mia, was nominated for the Strega Prize and won the Brancati Prize. A Girl Returned, her third novel, won the Campiello Prize.

Reviews for A Girl Returned

[boredgames · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

astoundingly good. empathetic, emotionally suspenseful, incredibly moving

[ridgewaygirl · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I just loved this short novel centers that on a thirteen-year-old girl who is abruptly sent away from the couple she had grown up believing were her parents and returned to the family of her birth parents. She's disoriented and this new family is not entirely welcoming. Her change in circumstances also means that her comfortable middle-class world is exchanged for that of a low income family with a lot of instability. She has three older brothers, only one of whom is kind to her, and a new younger sister, with whom she now shares a bed. The translation for this novel is by Ann Goldstein, who also translated Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan quartet and so the similarities are more than just the shared setting of a poor Italian neighborhood, but this novel is less sweeping soap opera than it is a coming-of-age story where a girl finds herself unmoored and then discovers her own resilience. This is the first of Di Pietrantonio's novels to be translated into English and I am eagerly awaiting more.

[lauralkeet · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Suddenly and without warning, a young girl’s parents send her to live with a different family which, it turns out, is her biological family. The adults provide no explanation, and since the story is told in the first person, the reader is just as much in the dark as the girl. She goes from being an only child to one of many children, and must adapt to her new family’s relative poverty. The only bright spot is finding that she has a younger sister; the two become close. The girl never loses hope of being reunited with the couple she still views as her family, and doggedly questions her natural parents to understand why she was returned to them. The spare prose of A Girl Returned was translated from the Italian by Ann Gold, the translator for Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels, and it reads well. The girl’s confusion and emotions are palpable. Like her, I wanted to know the truth and I became invested in her welfare. But the reveal was forced, and the reason for the girl’s return was not fully believable (avoiding spoilers: the family was shielding her from a secret, but one she was old enough to understand and live with). This ultimately left me with a “just okay” feeling about this book.

[mbmackay · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

After the Scandinavian era of crime fiction, we now seem to be in the era of Italian coming of age books featuring female leads. In the spirit of Elena Ferrante comes this short novelette about an Italian girl shuffled between families.I enjoyed it, although it seems to be too short - there could have been more development of the plot, and the hero. But if one of the benefits of reading is to take you to people and places off the familiar path, this book hits the nail on the head.