“Festa con casuario” is a generational novel that brings fragility and bewilderment of today’s young adults to the surface: the author is able to tell us, as no one else has been able to do, about their loneliness and inadequacy in a choral novel with a very tense plot full of suspense, where a party and a mystery (existential or real?) are the brilliant pretext to dissect the dynamics between a group of friends and the nuances of their lives and their (lack of) relationships.

Turin, early summer. Isa M., a 20-year-old college student, throws a party in her garden villa on the hills that surround the city. There is plenty of alcohol, food and drugs. Among the guests are classmates, friends, friends of friends and some gatecrashers. But the only guest Isa is really expecting, the only one who has not yet arrived, is Ezio, the boy she likes.

But suddenly an anonymous gift reveals a threatening note: Ezio will die unless someone dares to touch the neighbors’ cassowary by 1 a.m. The cassowary is a large bird that lives in Australia, and it is considered “the most dangerous one in the world”: it is capable of killing a man and beasts much larger than itself. In the novel it is actually kept as a garden animal in the neighbors’ mansion, feared and dreaded. Majestic.

The mysterious cassowary ordeal triggers a game of disguise and unravels youth’s uncertainties for the future. The protagonists are facing a challenge that will catapult them in the world of adulthood.