La strada buiosa nei suoi occhi neri

There are novels you remember for the plot and novels you remember for a house. This is one of the second kind. The house is a flat in Rome, in via Pamilio: nine children, a mother who puts the chain on the door every evening "to keep evil out of the nest", a father who comes home late and leaves the smell of his pipe in the air. Into that family's life, in the late Seventies, walks Nadeem: a journalist who has decided to love Enry, one of the sons, and who will not take no for an answer. Phone calls, someone lying in wait on the landing, letters, the kitchen window left open once too often. Twelve years later, Lory, one of the sisters, comes back to the house that has stayed shut ever since, and that is where the novel begins.

Ornella Gatti tells the story on three planes (the present, dream and memory) and moves between them page by page with a sure hand. It is a risky choice, because it asks the reader to lose their footing along with Lory, but it is also why the book works: the persecution is not reported; it is relived, and the reader suffers it as the family does. The best pages are those of the siege. The scene in which Nadeem comes up in the lift and stands still in front of the door without knocking, "separated from the family by a few centimetres of wood", is one of the tensest we have read this year, and not a shot is fired. The break-in, one afternoon while the family is out, with the letter in which Nadeem describes herself as a monkey that has got into the "kingdom", tells us more about her mind than any diagnosis could. And the red Fiat 500 standing in the August sun, with Enry, the man she wants, walking up to her and laying his hands on the scorching bonnet, is pure noir: here nobody is innocent, not even those who are defending themselves.

The book has a theme, and carries it through images before explanations: the love that wants to possess against the love that knows how to protect, and the thin line between them, because even those who protect can end up holding on too tight. Water running through your fingers, a hand opening, a mother's scent of orange and vanilla: these are the signs of a novel that knows what it wants to say. The prose is clean and controlled, and in the closing chapters, with a dance to Albinoni's Adagio and a trial by candlelight, the writing reaches a theatrical register that few, on their first outing in the genre, allow themselves. The ending changes the meaning of everything that came before and, on a second reading, turns out to have been prepared from the very first pages with a watchmaker's care.

Not everything is on the same level. The recurring motifs (the scent, the "twelve years", the black eyes) come back more often than they need to and at times lose their force; the final chapter spells out at length what the images had already said perfectly well; and some of the supporting figures remain little more than sketches. These are the limits of a book that wants to say everything, and that could have trusted its reader more.

Anyone looking for a mystery with an investigation will not find one here: there is no culprit to uncover; Nadeem has a name and a face from the first pages. Anyone looking for psychological noir, the story of a family under siege and of what the siege leaves inside those who survive it, is holding a short, intense novel, written with honesty and with a real ability to build fear within four walls. Four stars, and a wish to read the next one.

We received a copy from the author, who commissioned this review in exchange for an honest assessment. The opinions are our own.

DualPen Books, the editorial team · 13 September 2026