So People Know It’s Me

128 pages · Kindle · Steerforth & Pushkin | Pushkin Press · May 2026

Under Supervision

Francesca Benvenuto’s novel takes the shape of a prison diary. It is written under supervision.

Zeno Iaccarino, fifteen, writes from Nisida at the urging of his teacher. Write your life. Earn trust. He asks her to leave a few mistakes so “people know it’s me”. The diary is meant to correct him. Zeno uses it to hold his ground, where institutions organise identity through correction and erasure.

He knows he is being read. The prose tightens around that fact. It is blunt, fast, often irreverent. When he addresses judges, priests, reformers, the tone shifts from swagger to correction. Zeno rejects the version of him they prefer. He was not unloved. That argument begins at home. His mother, who survives through sex work, is not a moral lesson. She is his measure of loyalty.

Nisida is designed to contain. Lessons, reports, supervised corridors. Beyond it sits Forcella, intact. The neighbourhood that produced him does not vanish because he has been isolated. The sea surrounds the island. It promises nothing.

Religion and reform turn into theatre. Letters to the Pope. A staged Nativity. A “Day of the Future” where officials ask boys what they want to become. Zeno answers the premise directly:

“You can’t just erase us and start all over!”

It breaks the script. Change is demanded, but erasure is the method, a demand that also shapes The Slip, where recognition comes without change. The institution wants a clean story. Zeno leaves the stain in place.

Humour keeps him out of their script. He mocks ceremony, undercuts his own swagger, destabilises moral instruction. Confession would deliver a clean arc of remorse. He does not supply it. He speaks, but he does not surrender the terms.

He was recruited at twelve. Insomnia, fear, calculation. Later he writes:

“But most of all, I wish I’d been born a child.”

It states the damage. Childhood was never available to him as a category.

Benvenuto controls the architecture tightly. The imagined island Zeno builds in his head mirrors Nisida in reverse — open, vertical, without doors, without surveillance. The symmetry is exact. At times almost too exact. The containment mirrors the institution. It also dulls the shock it describes.

No one here is purely villainous. Teachers try. Guards hesitate. Care appears in flashes. None of it scales. The world outside remains organised along the same lines that placed him inside.

In translation, the voice keeps its abrasion. It does not smooth. It does not uplift.

The novel does not convert him. It does not elevate him into a moral emblem. It leaves him within the limits it has drawn. That decision is not sentimental. It is consistent.

Advance copy provided by Netgalley and Steerforth & Pushkin | Pushkin Press