Her Name That Day: A Novel

Giuliana Striano is forty years old and lives in Cape Town, South Africa. She is the daughter of Italian emigrants with a daughter of her own, Renata, now five years old. Upon the death of her mother, Giuliana learns that she had been adopted and given a new identity with a different name and a different date and place of birth. So Giuliana determines to find out who she really is, what is hidden in her past, and who her birth parents were.

Her Name That Day the story of "another" Italy set in a region that only recently became Italian and whose characters are Croatian, Slovenian, Australian, and South African, as well as Italians, precariously perched in a border community filled with secrets and scores to settle with History. Against this backdrop, the narrator endeavors to save a woman encountered by chance on the internet from becoming still another name without a history, another deracinated and disenchanted individual. In prose that is precise and engaging, as though shot through by a sense of pain both silent and inescapable, Pietro Spirito gives shape to an existential thriller in which there are neither guilty parties nor heroes, only victims and survivors.

• Publication date: 30 September 2026
• Page count: 244
• Dimensions: Height 203 mm; Width 127 mm; Thickness 18 mm
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Format: Hardback
• ISBN-13: 9781978841345