Party Animal

byLeonardo San Pietro, Todd Portnowitz (Translator)
It’s the beginning of summer. Isa M., a literature student, is throwing a party at her family’s villa on the outskirts of Turin. The music is loud, the drinks are flowing, and the garden is packed with friends – and maybe a few gatecrashers. The only guest who hasn’t arrived yet is Ezio, the boy she’s falling in love with.

Then an anonymous gift turns up on the kitchen table: a bottle of wine with a card that reads, Unless someone touches the cassowary before one a.m., Ezio dies.

At first it seems like a prank. Except Ezio still isn’t answering his phone. And no one’s sure who brought the bottle. Or what, exactly, a cassowary is . . .

As the hours tick by – and the undergrads wade further into a heady mix of alcohol, drugs, jealousy, lust and dread – the gravity of the dare sinks in.

A surprising and spellbinding novel, its language razor-sharp and filled with little delights. San Pietro manages to capture, with graceful command, those very last days of youth – when everything feels charged with wonder and meaning, when life brims with poetry and adventure and a mysterious sense of freedom

VINCENZO LATRONICO, author of Perfection

About Leonardo San Pietro

Leonardo San Pietro was born in Turin in 1997. He studied at the Holden School of Creative Writing and worked as a reader at Giulio Einaudi Editore. He recently completed a master’s degree in linguistic sciences in Bologna, where he lives. Party Animal, his first novel, received Italy’s Premio Mondello in 2025 and is now being translated into thirteen languages.
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Details
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • ISBN: 9781529982107
  • Length: 176 pages
  • Price: £9.99
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