I Am Not Chiara

Lake Como, 28 June 2014. During the fireworks of the Sagra di San Giovanni, thirteen-year-old Chiara Varenghi, the daughter of a silk family, disappears from the boathouse of the Villa dei Gelsi. A sandal is found on the boards. The investigation concludes she ran away.

Marseille, February 2026. A pale, thin young woman with two teeth missing walks into the Italian consulate: “My name is Chiara Varenghi. They kept me in a cellar.” She is not Chiara. But her mother, Livia, flies in from Como, looks at her for three seconds and takes her in her arms. She doesn't whisper a single question in her ear. She gives her an order.

In the villa by the lake, the false Chiara sleeps in the real one's bedroom, under glow-in-the-dark stars stuck to the ceiling. She knows everything about this life: the swimming medals, the dog called Dante, the piano lessons she hated. Everything except the code for the gate. A brother who drinks and says nothing, a cook who keeps testing her, a carabiniera who never believed in the runaway story: everyone around her is hiding something. So is she. She hasn't come for the money. She has come to find out who, in this house, knew.

A dark novel about the girls people look for, and the ones they don't.

A work of pure fiction: the characters, the family, the villa and the company are invented. Deals with the imprisonment of children and the death of a minor, always off the page, with no sexual content and no gratuitous description.