IL CERCHIO PERFETTO

An unpredictable and tense psychological drama, this powerful narrative explores youth and desire, manipulative relationships, a looming unsettling catastrophe, and the places we belong to and that haunt us.

Two alternating story lines intertwine in a fast-paced narrative. One is set in the 1980s and proceeds backwards, tracing the love story between a twenty-year-old woman, Lidia, and the young architect who worked on the renovation project of the house her father gave her in the center of Milan. A peculiar house, a visionary and apparently austere architectural project with a square plan on the outside and a circular one on the inside, in which every room resonates with a special vibration, a mystery: a place that celebrates the clandestine and asymmetrical love story between the two, the fragility of Lidia and the ambition of the young man. It is here that Lidia dies, at the beginning of the novel. Several decades later, we find that same house in a near future where the climate catastrophe and the migratory crisis are in full swing. Rome is torrid and unlivable, Milan eternally bathed in an orange haze, and this is where Irene, a 40-year-old successful real-estate agent grown rich from the divestment of Italy's artistic heritage, moves. A lonely, childless woman, she is entrusted by a wealthy lawyer with the auction sale of that difficult house. When Irene goes there for the first time she discovers that it's not empty; a young woman has settled there, an elusive presence, a stray twenty-something cut off from society, to whom Irene, after an initial diffidence, is attracted. But the girl is not there by chance; her name is Lidia and she is hiding something... Claudia Petrucci (1990) graduated in Modern Literature in Milan and lives in Australia. In 2020 she published her first novel, L'esercizio, winner of Premio Flaiano Giovani, which has been translated in many countries.