Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published Oct 2017
464 pages
Genre: Mysteries
Publication Information
Winner of the 2015 Strega Prize, Italy's preeminent prize for fiction, Ferocity is a cinematic suspense novel that also addresses vital social questions, a combination of Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl and Jonathan 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 neighborhoods of a southern Italian metropolis, 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 an exhilirating, ambitious, and vivid work of fiction by Italy's foremost literary novelist.
"Starred Review. A rich and readable cautionary tale for strong-minded readers." - Library Journal
"This oblique kaleidoscopic approach allows the mystery to slowly and captivatingly resolve while offering a layered portrait of contemporary Italian life and the abuses of power that money can excuse." - Publishers Weekly
"A mesmerizing exploration of failure, resilience, and profound, multifaceted loss." - Kirkus
"Lagioia is one of the most interesting Italian authors alive today." - Domenica del Sole 24 Ore (Italy)
"Lagioia brilliantly demonstrates the folly of his characters: rather than describing them from the outside, he constructs his narrative by oscillating unceasingly between past and future, premonition and regret." - Corriere della Sera (Italy)
"A story about family, about wealth, about Italians, about a humanity that is obscenely spent and confounded. A powerful, supremely well-crafted novel." - Internazionale (Italy)
"There's something Balzacian about Ferocity (and something that puts one in mind of Franzen's The Corrections). It digs beneath current events, inhabiting a zone that is more opaque and ambiguous than the nightly news." - TuttoLibri (Italy)
"Nicola Lagioia's latest novel opens with a scene that is hypnotically, devastatingly beautiful." - Avvenire (Italy)
"This novel reminds one of the Greek tragedies and those ineluctable questions about the relationship between choice and destiny." - Alias (Italy)
This information about Ferocity was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Nicola Lagioia, born in Bari in 1973, is an editor for the Italian publisher Minimum Fax. He is the author of three novels and a collection of short stories. His books have been awarded the Strega Prize, the Premio Volponi, and the Premio Viareggio, among others. He lives in Rome. Ferocity is his English-language debut.
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