The Wrong Side

A searing coming-of-age novel about an ordinary boy’s descent into extremism. 

“With crystalline clarity and chilling tenderness, The Wrong Side portrays a boy’s fascination with violence through the lens of adolescent enchantment—driven not by hatred or rebellion but by a fragile search for meaning.”—Vincenzo Latronico, author of Perfection 

Milan, early 2000s. Ettore is fourteen years old, quiet, and unremarkable—the kind of boy nobody worries about. But when he leaves the suburbs for a prestigious high school in the city, the world he enters feels vast, chaotic, and impenetrable. Surrounded by strangers and stripped of familiar reference points, he struggles to navigate the invisible hierarchies that seem to govern everything: confidence, popularity, masculinity. Then he meets Giulio—charismatic, politically radicalized, and part of a fringe neofascist group that offers exactly what Ettore lacks: structure, identity, and purpose. 

What begins as curiosity slowly hardens into commitment. Drawn into an increasingly extremist world, Ettore finds not only companionship but a seductive sense of certainty that transforms his confusion into conviction. Step by step, almost imperceptibly, he crosses thresholds from which there may be no easy return. 

Told with intimate urgency and psychological precision, The Wrong Side is both a chilling portrait of radicalization and a tender, unsettling exploration of male loneliness, vulnerability, and the desperate need to belong—of what it means to be a boy who cannot yet name what he’s searching for, and who finds the wrong answer first. 

“Why do people become fascists when they’re so young and everything is still in one piece?”