Winner of Italy’s Strega Prize, Ferocity, translated from the Italian by Antony Shugaar, is a hypnotic novel, a feverish drama unfolding in 1980s Bari. Lagioia opens with a lyrical description of a “fleet of moths” circling on a moonlit night. A young woman enters the villa’s garden. Naked, ashen, covered in blood, she stumbles along, ultimately walking down the center of the state highway and into the path of a speeding car. A reported suicide. Clara’s tormented half-brother Michele investigates obsessively. Was her death tied to their father, dubbed “the vandal king of the Gargano Coast”? To her husband, who witnessed her coming home covered with bruises? Or the men she was seeing: the judge, the surgeon, the politician? The mystery of what happened to Clara Salvemini takes us down dark pathways of familial and societal corruption.
