#RivetingReviews: Rosie Goldsmith reviews THE NIGHT TREMBLES by Nadia Terranova, translated by Ann Goldstein

The Italian novelist and children’s writer, Nadia Terranova, was born in Messina on the coast of northeast Sicily, and it’s this specific geography that inspires her latest novel in English, The Night Trembles. Her translator is Ann Goldstein, the gold standard Italian translator of, among others, Elena Ferrante, who also translated Terranova’s first novel, Farewell Ghosts in 2020, shortlisted for the Strega-Prize – the Italian equivalent of the Booker Prize. All this is to underline Terranova’s impressive literary credentials.

The Night Trembles, with an endorsement from none other than Annie Ernaux on the front cover, is a good place to start. It’s the dramatic story of lives impacted by the 1908 earthquake in the Strait of Messina, which separates Sicily from the Italian mainland. It nearly destroyed the two cities of Messina and Reggio Calabria on either side of the Strait and remains Europe’s deadliest earthquake. The writing matches the intensity and power of this event, reflecting the trauma of the two fictional protagonists, eleven-year-old Nicola in Reggio and twenty-year-old Barbara in Messina, whom we first meet the evening just before the earthquake strikes. Parallel cities, parallel stories, told in alternating chapters.

Nicola has just completed his dinner watched over by his ugly, abusive, mad, controlling mother and his deliberately indifferent father, a successful businessman and inventor of a famous Calabrian Bergamot perfume. (Sensory experiences and descriptions electrify this novel). Then Nicola gets up, walks out of the house through the garden to a trapdoor and down into a cellar where he sleeps on a bier in a coffin in total darkness and among the creatures of the night. His mother ties him down and shuts the trap door. Nicola’s parents profess to be protecting him from the devil. He knows nothing else, no other life.

It happened every night. Once he was alone, rather than sinking into an isolated unconsciousness, Nicola began to suffer from the ropes around his wrists … While the darkness ate the air in his lungs, an invisible force shook his body, and a presentiment of death flooded the cellar. He fell asleep like that, between visions and terrors, until, punctually, the nightmares arrived.

In the second chapter, on the same December evening, we meet Barbara. She’s on a train, deposited by her overprotective, god-like father to stay with her grandmother in Messina where she hopes to escape her gilded cage and the marriage her father has organised for her. There is no mother in Barbara’s story, only her profound absence:

My father was my God and I didn’t adore him … He didn’t know that escapes to the city and into books had allowed me to survive my childhood, my mother‘s death, and the cold winters.

The chapters are heavily laden with religious significance and Greek myths, with Tarot card readings, metaphors and monsters, with sumptuous prose and acutely observed psychology and physicality. We become intimate with the bodies and the minds of Barbara and Nicola: her inner life seethes, she longs to rebel, whereas Nicola is subdued, subjugated and silenced by cruelty. They both inhabit prisons created by their deluded parents. For some readers this oppressive cloak may just be too heavy, too sad, but there is rhythm and music in the writing, the magnificent description of the earthquake carries you along, down to the tiniest details of hands poking out of the rubble and toppling statues in the piazzas, until gradually the gloom lifts. Barbara and Nicola have been spared: A giant had sat on the house, and it had been unable to bear the weight. They lose their homes, their identity, names and all that defined them, but they have been liberated from their prisons and are now free to start to rebuild their lives. Barbara declares:

I would no longer hear my grandmother’s reproach, I would not have to ask permission for my ambitions, apologise for my behaviour. Of course I would never have suspected that freedom would be presented to me in the guise of an abyss…I was free in a frightening and irreversible way, and I had to use that gift before it used me.

The novel continues with the resurrection and rebirth, in very different ways, of Nicola and Barbara. They experience love, joy and freedom, and sobering loss. Their early traumas are like livewires in their brains. Nicola and Barbara are unrelated, the live in separate cities, but nevertheless they meet fleetingly during the earthquake, a meeting with profound consequences for both of them. Nicola’s story is related in the third person and Barbara’s in the first. Is she in fact narrating the whole story? We find out only in the closing paragraph of the novel. Barbara confesses early on that she wants to be a writer one day and comments obsessively on her favourite novel Maria Landini by the long-forgotten Sicilian writer Letteria Montoro. (I discovered Montoro thanks to Terranova’s novel).

The role of writing, especially women’s writing, is elevated to prime position in The Night Trembles. There is a strong feminist message, embodied by Barbara herself. The role of the mother is central in the novel too, the good, the bad and the ugly mother. Motherhood is a fascinating theme in a beautifully satisfying, non-hectoring, celebratory feminist novel. If when you think of Sicilian literature you think of Leonardo Sciascia, Andrea Camilleri or Tomasi di Lampedusa, I suggest that you now include Natalia Ginzburg, Letteria Montoro and Nadia Terranova. Terranova writes with the full force of Elena Ferrante, another contemporary writer defined by her portrayal of great cities, profound human experiences and the depths of the female psyche and also translated by Ann Goldstein. A triumph.

Reviewed by Rosie Goldsmith

THE NIGHT TREMBLES

Written by Nadia Terranova

Translated from Italian by Ann Goldstein

Published by Seven Stories Press (2025)

December 2025 #RivetingReviews titles are available to buy from bookshop.org.

Rosie Goldsmith is Director and Founder of the European Literature Network and Editor-in-Chief of The Riveter. She was a BBC broadcaster for twenty years and is today an arts journalist and presenter. She was chair of the judges for the EBRD Literature Prize 2018–2020.

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