Leda is a solitary thirteen years old girl. She feels she has a specific fate, that of destroying, hurting the people she cares about, even though she suffers. This is what her father, aspiring mayor, rubs in her face since he returned after many years away, while the mother barricaded herself in silence. Lost and alone, Leda finds her role models in Giosuè, the marshal’s son, and Saverio, the school bully. Within the background of an unspecified island, these three kids find a mute and unidentified girl in a swamp, a mystery they want to solve. In order to get to the bottom of it, they follow the hints in a thick pinewood where prostitutes live, in the library and at the lighthouse. Suddenly, one day Leda’s unpredictable nature bursts at the expense of Clizia, an undesirable host of Leda’s mother, who runs some filthy, criminal business. What is it that caused that bloody reaction in a creature so full of candor? What is happening on the island?
“What do you actually know about what life is like?” Adults used to say this to me so often that one day, eventually, I asked it myself too – as if growing up was all about becoming a broken record or a glitched radio: worn out objects, basically, to be thrown away. At that time I was thirteen, I had very low marks in maths and I wasn’t one to be taken seriously.”
Michele Del Vecchio, 1993, has lived in Molise, Puglia
and Sicily, finally settling down in Torino, where he
teaches Italian Literature and History in high school. La
curvatura dell’orizzonte is his debut novel.
Pub date: January 2026
Length: pp. 256
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