Black September
On sale
20th August 2026
Price: £24.99
‘Veronesi truly knows and loves all matters of the heart’ – IAN MCEWAN
‘One of the most skilful and profound Italian storytellers of the past thirty years’ – DOMENICO STARNONE
Summer, 1972. At his family’s summer house in Versilia, Tuscany, twelve-year-old Gigio Bellandi’s life is changing: caught on the cusp of adolescence, he finds the familiar places and people newly strange and intoxicating. As he discovers the adult thrills of music and reading, Gigio begins to learn who he is and to see his family without the veils of childhood. And when Astel Raimondi enters his orbit – a girl who kindles dreams and feelings he could never have imagined – his young existence is changed forever.
But every new chapter is also an ending, though it is harder to recognise at the time. And as an unexpected storm starts to threaten the golden days of summer, Gigio’s world will be overturned forever.
Reconstructing that lost season with vivid intensity, Black September is an unforgettable coming-of-age novel about the fragility of innocence, the irreversible bloom of first love and the strange wonder of self-discovery, from one of Europe’s greatest storytellers.
‘Black September is the first Sandro Veronesi novel I’ve read. It won’t be the last. This one has everything: a vivid setting, jaw-dropping plot twists, dramatic tension that just builds and builds, and, best of all, characters worth not just caring about but suffering with’ – RICHARD RUSSO, AUTHOR OF EMPIRE FALLS
‘One of the most skilful and profound Italian storytellers of the past thirty years’ – DOMENICO STARNONE
Summer, 1972. At his family’s summer house in Versilia, Tuscany, twelve-year-old Gigio Bellandi’s life is changing: caught on the cusp of adolescence, he finds the familiar places and people newly strange and intoxicating. As he discovers the adult thrills of music and reading, Gigio begins to learn who he is and to see his family without the veils of childhood. And when Astel Raimondi enters his orbit – a girl who kindles dreams and feelings he could never have imagined – his young existence is changed forever.
But every new chapter is also an ending, though it is harder to recognise at the time. And as an unexpected storm starts to threaten the golden days of summer, Gigio’s world will be overturned forever.
Reconstructing that lost season with vivid intensity, Black September is an unforgettable coming-of-age novel about the fragility of innocence, the irreversible bloom of first love and the strange wonder of self-discovery, from one of Europe’s greatest storytellers.
‘Black September is the first Sandro Veronesi novel I’ve read. It won’t be the last. This one has everything: a vivid setting, jaw-dropping plot twists, dramatic tension that just builds and builds, and, best of all, characters worth not just caring about but suffering with’ – RICHARD RUSSO, AUTHOR OF EMPIRE FALLS
Reviews
PRAISE FOR VERONESI'S THE HUMMINGBIRD
'Magnificent... Everything that makes the novel worthwhile and engaging is here' - Guardian
'Inventive, bold, unexpected' - Sunday Times
'Not since William Boyd's Any Human Heart has a novel captured the feast and famine nature of a single life with such invention and tenderness' - Financial Times
'Masterly: a cabinet of curiosities and delights, packed with small wonders' - Ian McEwan
'Ardent, gripping, and inventive to the core' - Jhumpa Lahiri
Black September is the first Sandro Veronesi novel I've read. It won't be the last. This one has everything: a vivid setting, jaw-dropping plot twists, dramatic tension that just builds and builds, and, best of all, characters worth not just caring about but suffering with
'A perfect novel . . . Melancholic and playful like the boy Gigio, who, on the slippery edge of adolescence, holds centre stage from the beginning to the end of the story . . . Veronesi proves himself a master . . . Unforgettable'
Veronesi plays a mischievous god, scattering the beach with false leads, knowing that the combination of summer and first love blinds everyone, inside and outside the novel . . . Capturing this oscillation between enchantment and disillusion without sarcasm or bitterness is no easy task, yet Veronesi succeeds. He writes with gentleness, with tenderness . . . It reads like a mystery without formally being one: a story where we wait not for the resolution but for the detonation . . . a novel of waiting, of pure tension; to see how far a thriller can go without revealing its core. Black September becomes a luminous declaration of love for the fragile fault lines that shape us . . . This impulse - to make the ordinary extraordinary - has a name: benevolence. And it has always been at the heart of Veronesi's writing. Once again, he returns to the sea and invites us to look outward, where there is something vast, beautiful, and irreplaceable
Among the many memorable adolescences in literature, there now appears-and asserts itself-that of Gigio Bellandi, protagonist and first-person narrator of Sandro Veronesi's new novel Black September . . . Veronesi is a masterful seeker of those nuggets of memory - songs, comics, books, news shocks, the language of another time - all woven into a story populated by living, breathing characters
Sandro Veronesi is truly brilliant. He excels at enchanting the reader with his kaleidoscope of stories . . . As in Annie Ernaux's The Years, private events are interwoven with public ones . . . There are many literary virtuoso moments . . . The novel resembles an intricate structure assembled without nails or screws, a perfectly oiled mechanism
Magnificent . . . Pure delight. Rarely are shifts in narrative tempo, the intertwining of intimacy and social panorama, of historical-cultural precision and human universality, balanced with such intelligence as in this concentrated story
Exude[s] extraordinary charm . . . All the portraits in Black September are moving . . . Pain, tenderness and desolation are mixed together, along with touches of humour. One smiles, one laughs, one becomes attached to the narrator and his formidable family
A languid, wistful work that tenderly explores the facets of childhood's endless summers . . . Veronesi's Italian prose excels at capturing the soft, hazy slowness of family holidays and the radiant selfishness of adolescence
A novel on a tightrope between tenderness and muted ferocity, between history - grand History - and the intimate . . . Veronesi's novel could limit itself to the bittersweet chronicle of a first love cut short by the end of summer, but the author - who knows better than anyone how to handle mystery and suspense - alerts us from the very first pages to the imminence of a drama . . . He delivers a vision of entry into adulthood that is as brutal as it is striking . . . Between a nostalgic portrait of an Italy marked by the turbulence of the seventies and a psychological thriller, Black September is a strangely addictive novel that leaves the reader changed . . .Yet another fine achievement
Under Sandro Veronesi's pen, the narrative shifts from a sensual, contemplative tone to a more openly moral stance in the final pages, regarding an Italian society forced-like its young hero-to grow up . . . Steeped in raw sensitivity, Black September questions our perception of the world and the way its trajectory can collide with our own
The story unfolds, insistent and gradually mesmerizing until it becomes gripping. Veronesi moves stealthily through this well-constructed narrative
Sandro Veronesi has the subtle art of bringing us so close to his characters that we identify with them. This owes much to his acute sense of observation, to the memories he manages to share, to the tension he builds - because we know a drama is coming - to the songs, comics, and news items he scatters throughout