SUMMARY
Irene's life changes forever on the day her best friend Nadia is murdered. The event shakes not only her, but also her mother, Flavia, tormented by insecurities and an unresolved relationship with her ex-husband Achille, a police inspector. At the funeral, Irene meets Oscar, a young man obsessed with the disappearance of his friend Enea, introduced years earlier by Nadia herself into a sinister circle. From this moment on, Achille's investigation becomes entangled with Irene's own discoveries, leading to the revelation of harrowing secrets and consuming resentments.
DATA
- Genre : Literary Fiction, Mystery
- Published: 14 July 2022
- Format: Novel - ePub, PDF
- Language: Italian
- Word Count: about 60,000
- CW: Bullying, Racism, Hate Speech, Victim Blaming, Gang Rape, Divorce, PTSD, Suicide, Drug Abuse, Murder, Weapon Violence.
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Few words about it
Some crimes shatter more than a single life; they fracture an entire day, an entire street, an entire family's sense of safety.
On the last afternoon before her high school finals, seventeen-year-old Irene watched her closest friend, Nadia, get shot dead before her eyes on a Verona pavement.
The story is told through two intertwined voices: Irene, a teenage girl who is struggling between anxiety and the need to find a direction in life, and Flavia, Irene's mother, a schoolteacher and ex-wife of the police inspector leading the investigation. Between them, mother and daughter navigate a summer that should have been about exams, parties and first loves, but instead becomes an unravelling of secrets — about the murdered girl, about the people who loved her, and about the unremarkable-seeming boys and men who surrounded her. What emerges is not a simple whodunit, but a slow, painful excavation of what happens to pain when nobody is permitted to name it, and of the damage that silence does when it is mistaken for strength.
This is a novel deeply interested in the ghosts that live inside people rather than houses: the version of ourselves we bury when we can't bear to be seen, the guilt we carry for the harm we failed to prevent, the rage that curdles when a plea for help is met with disbelief or indifference. It moves with real tenderness between the perspective of a mother trying to shield a daughter who is fast outgrowing her protection, and that of a daughter discovering that the adults around her are just as frightened and fallible as she is. Verona itself, sweltering and ordinary, becomes a backdrop of striking intimacy.
The novel asks difficult questions about who is allowed to be labelled as a victim, about the human cost of institutions that look away, and about the impossible task of seeking justice for wounds that predate the crime being investigated by years. There is darkness, unflinchingly rendered, but there is also an abiding compassion for everyone caught inside it, including those who cause harm. Towards the end, Shedding Light On Our Ghosts offers no tidy comfort, no full restoration of what was lost. What it offers instead is honesty: an acknowledgement that some ghosts cannot be exorcised, only faced, named, and carried forward with a little more light than before.