Anyone whose first novel sells more than a million copies worldwide, and goes on to win Italy's most prestigious literary prize, the Premio Strega, is bound to turn the rest of us slightly green...But actually it's a very accomplished book and deserves all its success. It is ostensibly a coming-of-age novel about two lonely children who had traumatic incidents in their childhoods. Alice had a skiing accident, broke her leg and is forever labelled a cripple because of her limp. Mattia, meanwhile, abandoned his twin sister in a park; because she was mentally retarded, he found her an embarrassing encumbrance. She was never seen again. Giordano traces the next 24 years of their lives: their dislocation from society, their discomfort with their overbearing or overly solicitous parents, their distance from their school friends and even from each other. The title comes from Mattia's notion (he's a maths buff) that Alice and he are "twin primes", like 11 and 13, or 17 and 19, lonely individuals that are forever linked but forever separated. It all makes for a melancholic, but strangely beautiful, read. Shaun Whiteside's translation is exemplary and the acute descriptions of teenage competitiveness, angst and aspiration bring to mind Alan Warner's writing. In some ways the book's cult status is similar to Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther and perhaps for the same reason: it's strangely enjoyable, almost consoling, to read about other people's fictional tragedies. – Reviewed in The Guardian