Thresholds

By Flavio De niro

Maria Ferrante is twenty-three years old, freshly graduated with honors in molecular biology, and unexpectedly reunited with her ex-boyfriend at a bus stop in Catania on the day of her final exam. When she returns to her family's villa in Syracuse, among the olive trees of the Cava Grande del Cassibile canyon, something begins to change.
First, red eyes in the darkness between the olive trees at night. Then a figure at the canyon pools - tall, still, with a gaze that already knows her. He calls himself Neymar, or at least that is the name that comes out of her mouth unbidden. He speaks like someone who already knows everything. He holds her wounded hand and the pain shifts. He disappears without a trace.
Meanwhile Francesco Ardita - the ex-boyfriend, the architect, the man who said sorry at the bus stop - keeps coming back to the villa. He says phrases she has already heard, dreams things that have happened to her, carries a weight he cannot yet name. And Paola, her younger sister, draws figures that do not physically exist but exist in something else entirely.
When the headaches become daily, when Maria loses nearly two hours of memory sitting on the porch, when words arrive with the wrong sound, it is time to see a doctor. The diagnosis is a grade-two glioma in the right temporal lobe - that precise region of the brain responsible for distinguishing internal stimuli from external ones. The region that, when it malfunctions, builds figures and voices from available material. From emotions. From desires. From people one loves and cannot yet admit to loving.
Soglie - Thresholds - is the story of what the brain builds when it is sick. And of what a woman builds for herself, after.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0GYC3K29N
• ISBN13: 9798258288462
• Release Date: April 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 166 Pages
• Weight: 0.51 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 6.0" x 9.0"