Anyone who survives a lightning strike knows what it means to be alive. When Vera is diagnosed with breast cancer for the second time, she moves back in with her cantankerous and entrepreneurial father, Zeno. It is the first time she has slept in the family home since her mother died, of the same cancer, almost a decade earlier. Wandering through this house which vibrates with solitude, Vera stumbles upon Zeno's most surprising secret: a novel. 

Vera herself is a writer, but she hasn't published work for years. Confined now to Quaderni, a village in the province of Verona, and haunted by signs of mortality, the discovery of her father's private fantasy world presents an unexpected opportunity.

Constructed between family visits, hospital appointments, and through fragments of memories, conversations, and the kernels of stories yet to be written, Struck is at once a delicate portrait of a family navigating life's catastrophes and a gently defiant celebration of the act of writing.

“Susanna handles illness and pain while remaining miraculously joyful.” Paolo Cognetti

“A family story, universal and intimate, poetic and persuasive…, a meta-novel full of grace that seeps into the readers’ hearts and beats page after page. A fluorescent bolt of lightening.“ La Stampa

“An intense literary novel… at once sparkling and intense in its expressive vivacity.” Il Corriere della Sera

“Struck is a book that speaks to the heart, in a reflection of the heart with which it was clearly written and translated.” Rosie Eyre, European Literature Network