From Abruzzo to the Americas, these three translated books tell extraordinary tales

That Elena Ferrante has been Italy’s most prominent literary export for years now is perhaps to the detriment of that country’s other great contemporary writers.

One is Donatella Di Pietrantonio, a pediatric dentist who shares a publisher and translator with Ferrante (Europa, Ann Goldstein, respectively). Like Ferrante, Di Pietrantonio writes female coming-of-age stories, though the measured style of her Strega Prize-winning fifth novel, The Brittle Age , has none of the narrative relentlessness that characterizes Ferrante’s Neapolitan trilogy. Slim and emotionally perceptive, it’s based on the real-life murders, in the 1990s, of two young women, and the attempted murder of a third, in Italy’s Abruzzo region.

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You wouldn’t call it true crime though, sinc