Ilaria, or The Conquest of Disobedience

Kidnapped by her troubled father, a young girl navigates life on a road trip across 1980s Italy in this stunning, cinematic English-language debut.

One day in May 1980, 8-year-old Ilaria gets into her father’s car after school. As they stop at a series of highway hotels, traversing the north of Italy, the child thinks of her mother and promises herself not to cry anymore. She learns to drive and to lie, discovers Trieste, Bologna, a boarding school in Rome, a sunny rural life in Sicily.

Thanks to the games they play, the hit songs they sing at the tops of their voices on the road, and the kind people Ilaria meets along the way, the kidnapping almost seems like a normal childhood. But her father drinks too much, nervous in a cloud of cigarette smoke. If he takes her by the hand, she thinks it’s better not to pull it away. Ilaria observes and feels everything.

In gripping, precise prose, this poignant novel takes us inside the mind of a little girl who must grow up on her own.