Claudia Durastanti may be a new novelist as far as most Americans are concerned, but Strangers I Know is actually the Italian author’s fourth novel, her first to be published in translation in America. Originally published in 2019 as La straniera in Italy, the book was a finalist for the Premio Strega.

Durastanti, 37, was born in Brooklyn and is a translator herself, having rendered F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby and other books into Italian, but it’s the award-winning translator Elizabeth Harris who has translated Strangers I Know.