this book was handled really well. its had the main plots but also those little rippled points that are often just as important... the side shoots of the plot. we have the story of both our character separately and also together and how they both impact one another. you often did and do think of the Covid times by how they impacted those you love and those around you. but there are so many stories that must be involved in that time. so many stories that must have been effected by lock downs. and this is one such example. and just because it might not be exactly the same as our own doesn't mean we cant see the feelings and emotional moments as close to our own. and the other part of the book tells the story of a mother and her daughter. how roles are kept the same but also as time shifts how they slip, slide and sometimes swap. both woman have been through something. and both have been effected greatly. and i thought the telling of this was done with the delicacy it deserved and needed. covid is not the dominant theme in the book which i think was brilliant as i didnt want that to be bogging down or stripping the main points or themes away. and it didnt at all, but like the time itself it was an important part in our history and for many set things into motion that might not have happened. or put us with people we might not have. in good ways and bad ways it had it effects. but this is very much the about our main characters. and i really liked that the author managed to keep that authenticity.

This is an intense narrative with none of the playful humour of 'A Girl Returned' but written with a similar economy of style and emotional authenticity.

While the plot seems sparse: a daughter who returns to live with her mother in the mountains during covid; the mother, Lucia's, memories of a traumatic crime that took place when she was Amanda's age - for me, this is a book about the precarity of safety, especially for women, and the struggle to find a way to live within such contingency. With so much interest in Lucia's interiority and the past crime, I appreciated the depiction of Lucia's father whose trust in his own landscape and ability to keep 'his' women safe is called into question: 'for my father it was the safest place in the world. Safer than the crowded bus that carried me to the sea, or the beach with the near-naked people. For him, the dangers were down there. Instead his woods had betrayed him... In those hours he had lost all his certainties; he stared at me as if I could explain to him such a death.'

Alongside the crime and its effects on a small community, this book layers up the disjunctions caused by the covid years as well as the emotional flux that can turn a marriage into a relationship that withers and which needs to be discarded. So many forms of stability are shown to be vulnerable, unsteady, fragile and 'brittle' as the title has it - and this book encompasses them in a way that is deceptively simple and straightforward.

For all the accessibility and lovely clarity of Lucia's voice, this is a richer, deeper, and more moving exposition than we might think at first sight.

Very much doubting between 3 and 4 stars... I appreciated how controlled and realistic it felt. At the same time, I felt she was trying to do too much in too few pages.

The Brittle Age is set in rural Abruzzo. Our narrator Lucia is a middle-aged woman whose daughter Amanda - due to Covid and because she was attacked - comes back home from Milan where she was studying. Amanda's passivity, possibly a sign of depression, is hard for Lucia. At the same time, Lucia inherits her father's land in the mountains, with a camping ground. Decades earlier a gruesome double murder happened there, more or less when Lucia had the (fragile) age her daughter has now.

It won the Premio Strega, but although I enjoyed it I am not sure it's necessarily prizeworthy.

The Brittle Age by Donatella Di Pietrantonio is a delicate, emotionally rich novella that captures the quiet turbulence of aging, memory, and maternal bonds. The story centres on a woman navigating the slow decline of her once-dominant mother, as roles reverse and long-buried tensions rise to the surface.

Subtle but deeply affecting, the book meditates on fragility—of the body, of relationships, and of time itself. It’s a beautifully observed portrait of vulnerability and care, told with restraint and compassion. A short but resonant read.