A Girl Returned

by Donatella Di Pietrantonio, Ann Goldstein (Translator)

Overview

“One of the best Italian novels of the year” in a pitch-perfect rendering in English by Ann Goldstein, Elena Ferrante’s translator (Huffington Post, Italy).

Winner of the Campiello Prize

A 2019 Best Book of the Year (The Washington Post Kirkus Reviews Dallas Morning News)

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.

Without warning or explanation, an unnamed thirteen-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, tension, and conflict, especially between the young girl and her mother. 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.

“An achingly beautiful book, and an utterly devastating one.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune

“Di Pietrantonio [has a] lively way with a phrase (the translator, Ann Goldstein, shows the same sensitivity she does with Elena Ferrante) [and] a fine instinct for detail.” —The Washington Post

“A gripping, deeply moving coming-of-age novel; immensely readable, beautifully written, and highly recommended.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Captivating.” —The Economist

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781609455293
Publisher:	Europa Editions, Incorporated
Publication date:	03/23/2021
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	144
Sales rank:	920,936
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Donatella Di Pietrantonio lives in Penne where she practices as a pediatric dentist. From the age of nine she has been writing stories, fables, poems, and novels. My Mother Is a River is her first novel. It was first published in Italy in 2011, where it won the Tropea and the John Fante literary prizes, and was translated into German in 2013. Her second book, Bella Mia, was published in 2014 and won the Brancati Prize.

Ann Goldstein is an editor at The New Yorker. Her translations for Europa Editions include novels by Amara Lakhous, Alessandro Piperno, and Elena Ferrante's bestselling My Brilliant Friend. She lives in New York.

Editorial Reviews

06/03/2019

In her first U.S.-published work, Di Pietrantonio (My Mother Is a River) tells the spellbinding story of a girl whose life is upended by a shift in her family. In August of 1975, the unnamed 13-year-old narrator is dropped off at the apartment of her birth family in a nameless Italian town by the man that she believed to be her father but who is, in fact, only a distant cousin of her biological father. She is given no reason for being taken from the only home that she has known and given to a loveless family that she’s never met. Though she comes to love her newfound younger sister, Adriana, and her baby brother, Giuseppe, and has a few adventures—rides at a festival, returning to her home city for a birthday party for her friend Patrizia—her existence is mostly one of befuddlement, anger, and sadness. The narrative covers a little over a year, and while these vignettes do not form a plot any more than they would in anyone’s life, the narrator does eventually come to understand her adoptive mother’s choice and come to a rapprochement with her. Occasional, brief comments from the narrator as an adult reveal that she has attained a modicum of normalcy. Still, her description of herself is heart-rending: “I was a child of separations, false or unspoken kinships, distances.” Goldstein’s translation flows smoothly, giving American readers a glimpse of a different time and place. Di Pietrantonio’s story has the feel of a memoir as much as literary fiction; it perfectly captures an unusual situation in one girl’s life. (July)

Publishers Weekly

Di Pietrantonio [has a] lively way with a phrase (the translator, Ann Goldstein, shows the same sensitivity she does with Elena Ferrante) [and] a fine instinct for detail.”—The Washington Post

★ “A gripping, deeply moving coming-of-age novel; immensely readable, beautifully written, and highly recommended.”—Kirkus Review (Starred Review)

“Spellbinding.”—Publishers Weekly

“A captivating tale about the trials of settling down, fitting in and battling on amid emotional upheaval.”—The Economist

“An achingly beautiful book, and an utterly devastating one.”—Minneapolis Star Tribune

“Donatella Di Pietrantonio employs sensitive and powerful prose to tell the conflicting coming-of-age story of mothers and daughters, of sisterhood, and of self-discovery.”—World Literature Today

“With unflinching perception, in A Girl Returned Di Pietrantonio presents a heartrending tale of a child discarded, never quite reclaimed.”—Shelf Awareness

“Set against the rugged landscape of Abruzzo, Italy, A Girl Returned explores the arbitrariness of origin and family relationships, and questions whether we really belong anywhere.”—New Statesman

From the Publisher

★ 2019-05-12
In this slim novel by award-winning Italian author Di Pietrantonio, her first translated into English, a 13-year-old girl raised by distant relatives as their own is sent abruptly back to her birth family with little explanation.

The book opens with the unnamed narrator carrying a suitcase and a bag of shoes up the stairs to an apartment where the door is stuck closed. At last a child with untidy hair opens it. "She was my sister, but I had never seen her." The man she has until now believed to be her father is dropping her off. In the dining room, her birth mother receives her without ceremony or interest, not bothering to get up from her chair. When the girl runs back down to the car, desperate to convince her erstwhile father to take her back ("Mamma's sick, she needs my help. I'm not staying here, I don't know those people"), he removes her bodily from the front seat and drives away. "The tire marks and I remained on the asphalt....The air smelled of burning rubber. When I raised my head, someone from the family that was mine against my will was looking down from the second-floor windows." Raised an only child in a comfortable, middle-class home, accustomed to days at the beach and dance lessons, she finds herself in an apartment crowded with violent strangers. There's not enough to eat, and no bed has been arranged for her. She sleeps on a mattress stuffed with sheep's wool, holding the sole of her sister's foot against her cheek: "I had nothing else, in that darkness inhabited by breath." In spare, haunting prose, Di Pietrantonio shows a girl struggling not only to understand, but to survive and belong. "You haven't known poverty," her birth mother tells her, "poverty is more than hunger." Class inequality, misogyny, and sexism are all at work as well. Late in the novel, in a scene both harrowing and illuminating, her two worlds overlap when she and her sister visit the house of the woman who raised her.

A gripping, deeply moving coming-of-age novel; immensely readable, beautifully written, and highly recommended.

Kirkus Reviews