So People Know It’s Me, set in the winter of 1991, is a unforgettable novel which unleashes Zeno’s luminous, unguarded and defiant voice- dreaming of a fragile future, set in the juvenile prison island of Nisida. Zeno is fifteen years old, a minor by law, but he grew up long ago in the dusty heat of Naples.  The novel follows one man’s self-realisation in a foreboding juvenile prison. Winding down cobbled streets on his motorbike, he delivers baggies and picks pockets, doing whatever it takes to put food on the table and steal a few precious moments of freedom with his girlfriend, Natalina, in the city’s starlit piazzas. Then a rival gang member pulls up beside him with a gun, and Zeno ends up on the brutal prison island of Nisida. Separated from all he loves by the cruel, glittering sea, with a cell window looking out at distant beaches, Zeno promises to write down the story of his life in exchange for a visit home. But the sea has eyes everywhere, and someone on the outside wants revenge. 

The novel captures a city of splendour in which a childhood is curtailed.

Ms Martina, a trusted and caring woman he refers simply as “Teach”. His reward will be a 48-hour Christmas furlough, during which he can visit his mother, a prostitute who raised him on her own in shocking deprivation. “In Forcella, we lived in a real zuzzuso shithole” writes Zeno, “Can’t really call it an apartment”. Their home has abed, two chairs, a table, with no window. The furniture is owned by a loan shark.  One of his mother’s client, Zeno starts bag snatching and dealing in “baggies” of drugs. His success draws the attention of a rival gang, who dispatch another teenager on a moped to gun him down. But Zeno gets in first, “I fired three times, just sorta at him and he fell over, all bloody…. But they caught me cause everybody saw me- it as morning”.

Zeno writes about his girlfriend -“The two of us, we’d walk holding hands, like grownups do when they’re together” – and tentative bonds with fellow prisoners, such as “Gaetano the Innocent’, who has taken the blame for an adult’s crime in exchange for a fee.

Elizabeth Harris’s well-judged translation from the Italian Zeno’s character, as an adolescent, who uses bravado to conceal his pain, materialises courtesy of what is unstated as much as what is revealed.

The story is inspired, Naples-born Benevenuto’s mother, who worked as a teacher at the real juvenile detention centre on Nisida. Benevenuto is now a Paris-based criminal lawyer, has a keen, professional understanding of the myriad causes of crime and the problems of punitive punishments.

So People Know It’s Me by Francesca Maria Benvenuto, translated by Elizabeth Harris, Pushkin Press £12.99, 160 pages.