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.

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.

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.