“With masterful storytelling, a tactile writing and a great sense of suspense, Antonella Lattanzi creates the perfect tense atmosphere to throw her readers in” – Nicola Lagioia, La Stampa – TuttoLibri

“Antonella Lattanzi has written a book so brilliant to be unsettling” – Valeria Parrella

“I read “Questo giorno che incombe” in one afternoon. The perfect plot captured me and what really enchanted me is the way in which Antonella Lattanzi talks about love, motherhood, desire, and fear” – Daria Bignardi, Radio Capital

“This writer will leave you breathless” – Antonella Fiori, F

“These are pages that keep you glued to the chair” – Marta Cervino, Marie Claire

“Like Shirley Jackson, Antonella Lattanzi builds up a rising tension without shouting, hiding it into the details of everyday life” – Annalena Benini, Il Foglio 

“In a gripping crescendo, Francesca’s story goes through various genres, from thriller to romance, all of them held together with a hypnotic prose” – Mariagrazia Ligato, Io Donna

“With sharp writing and a gripping plot, Lattanzi goes into the darkest corners of a family and sheds a light on the ambiguities and contradictions of every choice” – Cristina Taglietti, Corriere della sera

“Antonella Lattanzi is breathtaking, she always grips the reader and keeps him hooked. She ventures into darkness, she is not afraid to get dirty” – Elena Stancanelli, D la Repubblica

“A book about the punishment for those who don’t adjust or follow the crowd, those who are different. A book about that ghost we usually call love ” – La Repubblica

I wish to nominate for the Strega Prize Questo giorno che incombe by Antonella Lattanzi, published by HarperCollins. […] There is an unhappy woman and mother in this book, with a memorable voice always about to crack. There is a choir of common people who play a score with increasing ferocity. […] And there is always powerful writing. The result is a real and inventive look at our lives today. — Domenico Starnone

The new highly awaited novel by Antonella Lattanzi: a book that won’t let you sleep.

A gripping novel that investigates suspicion (where everyone becomes suspicious and everyone is a suspect, fearing the worst), fear, and evil, using the power of suggestion, a marvelous psychological thriller that grips the reader from the first page with brilliant literary writing and unsettling style. You get the impression that Alfred Hitchcock and Stephen King got together. Is there any nightmare worse than the disappearance of a little child from your own courtyard?

Francesca, a young mother and wife, decides to leave her job and dedicate herself to her family, to spend more time with her husband, Massimo, and their two children. Angela is five and Emma is one. The family has just arrived in Rome, where they are to live in the affluent “Giardino di Roma”, a residential community in a neighborhood near the center. Everything seems perfect: kind and considerate neighbors, a vast courtyard full of children for Angela and Emma to play with, the city and the seaside both within reach. It seems like a dream. But little by little, the idyll begins to deteriorate. To be alone with the children day and night proves more difficult than Francesca anticipated. Massimo is never there, coming home late and tired every night. Anxieties and fears from Francesca’s past reawaken. The kindness of the neighbors disturbs her. She feels crushed by solitude and begins a strange dialogue with the house. Perhaps the voice she hears within the walls is the voice of her own anguish. The situation worsens when Francesca realizes that she is suffering memory lapses. She wonders what’s causing them and fears what is happening during the blackouts. The only thing she is able to grasp is that something sinister lurks in the neighborhood courtyard.

Fabrizio enters the scene amidst all of this turbulence, an intriguing neighbor to whom Francesca finds herself drawn in a disquieting way. One fateful day, screams are heard coming from the courtyard: a little girl has vanished. While the police undertake the investigation and mass media takes interest in the story, everyone becomes suspicious and everyone is a suspect, fearing the worst.

Taking inspiration from a dark chronicle out of 1970s Bari where she was born, Antonella Lattanzi has written a book that investigates suspicion, fear, and evil, using the power of suggestion so well as to bring to mind Stephen King and Franz Kafka, Dostoevsky, and Polanski. A marvelous psychological thriller that grips the reader from the first page to the last line with brilliant writing and unsettling style.