| Author/Contributor(s): | San Pietro, Leonardo; Portnowitz, Todd |
| Publisher: | Knopf |
| Date: | 1/19/2027 |
| Binding: | Hardcover |
| Condition: | NEW |
“Surprising and spellbinding.” —Vincenzo Latronico, author of Perfection
It’s the beginning of summer. Isa M., a second-year lit major, is throwing a party at her family’s lavish villa on the outskirts of Turin. The music is loud, the prosecco is flowing, and the garden is packed with friends—and maybe a few gate-crashers. The only guest who hasn’t arrived yet is Ezio, the boy she’s falling in love with.
Then an anonymous gift turns up on the kitchen counter: a bottle of Barbera with a card that reads, Unless someone touches the cassowary before 1am, Ezio dies.
At first it seems like a prank. Except Ezio still isn’t answering his phone. And no one’s sure who brought the bottle. Or what, exactly, a cassowary is. (Or why the neighbors are keeping one in the surrounding woods!)
As the hours tick by—and the undergrads wade further into a heady mix of alcohol, drugs, jealousy, lust, and dread—the gravity of the dare sinks in. Shifting among a chorus of students (including a Tarot reader, a would-be philosopher in a parka, a perennial tag-along who’s been exiled from the group chat, and a shy artist from Puglia caught up in the night’s seductive chaos), Party with Cassowary captures the precarity of early adulthood with piercing wit and a generous heart.
Winner of Italy’s Premio Mondello, with rights sold in thirteen countries, Leonardo San Pietro’s debut is an existential thriller and a magnetic, mannerist portrait of a generation crippled by the weight of desire and decision.