Rebel against the twists of fate, resist the urge to succumb: these invitations lie at the heart of Sabrina Grementieri's novel , Prima del buio (Love Edizioni, 2025, 336 pages, also available as an ebook). The book's protagonist is Alexandra, a freelance photographer. An independent and determined woman, highly respected in her work, she has a longtime boyfriend, a close friend, and a full and fulfilling life.
The results of some medical tests violently shatter the harmony of his life and cast an irrevocable shadow over it. Lorenzo, on the other hand, owns a winery in the Alta Langa. He is the president of an association for retinopaths and visually impaired patients and seeks to provide concrete assistance to those affected; his goal is to raise funds for scientific trials.
Alexandra and Lorenzo collide on a humid autumn evening: she has just learned of his sentence, and he nearly hits her with his car . It all happens in a matter of minutes: enough, however, to change both their lives. But to succeed in changing their lives, the characters in this story must challenge fear, face their downfalls and inevitable setbacks, and regain faith in the future through hard work on themselves, day after day. Will they succeed?
A novel about illness, about the difficulty of “meeting” and accepting it, but also a story about how love and hope often go hand in hand , “Before the Dark” wants to remind us how important it is to know how to abandon ourselves serenely, but with passion, to the flow of life.
We asked Sabrina Grementieri: how did the choice to write a novel that starts with the discovery of an illness come about?
The idea of talking about the disease, specifically a vision-related condition, stems from a personal experience. Although I don't suffer from the same problem I write about in the book, I've always had vision problems since I was little. I won't deny that it's always scared me, and deciding to write about it was an attempt to exorcise that fear.
What is fear for you?
