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or contact Mario at mmpetrucci@hotmail.com
"A true 'one-off'... among the most original books I’ve encountered in years.”
Vesna Goldsworthy*
Excerpt: "Not Death the great leveller, but loss, a Loss greater than, with no clever aphorisms to express it, a simple equation, banal – a ‘why me?’,
or a ‘please make this go away’, an ‘oh dear god’ – Grief as ineloquent, like the three nestlings beneath your windowsill, huddled just out of view...
and all at once the vast anvil-headed cloud of Grief comes at you, forming within your grasp and only these three tiny pairs of thought to launch yourself into it."
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Imagine you found, concealed beneath floorboards, a journal that contained the most intimate thoughts of a man utterly lost to love, logging his slow resurfacing
from the wreck of a catastrophic relationship. When She Was carries all the potency of such a discovery, creating a compelling psychological narrative
from the teeming ‘randomness’ of daily reflection. There are many detours, into offbeat social observation, bottomless musings, even quantum physics;
but the unwavering heart of this book is its frank exposition of male thinking. Here, finally, C.S. Lewis meets Sally Rooney and Rob Doyle,
plumbing the tender culpabilities of living and loving, fearlessly riding the treacherous undercurrents of misunderstanding and rage.
Mario Petrucci’s impressive debut launches us into midnight swells of hurt, navigating vulnerability to its hard-won harbour: redemption.
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'There must be a moment when...' - excerpt from WHEN SHE WAS -
watch short video below... (not for redistribution)
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Alison Moore, Honorary Assistant Professor, Creative Writing (University of Nottingham).
Author: The Lighthouse (shortlisted: Man Booker Prize; National Book Awards). Winner: McKitterick Prize.
Vesna Goldsworthy, Professor of Creative Writing (University of Exeter).
“A compressed chronicle of love found, lost, and found again – though not in the way we'd think.
Mario Petrucci's debut is a true 'one-off' best captured through resonant contradictions: both tightly controlled and anarchic;
at once a novel and a prose poem, a whisper and a howl. When She Was is among the most original books I’ve encountered in years.”
Author: Gorsky; Iron Curtain. Winner: Milovan Vidaković Prize; Luna Virino Prize.
Patricia Duncker, Emerita Professor, Contemporary Literature (University of Manchester).
“A passionate exploration of heartbreak, rupture, and memory. Petrucci presents a man’s mind under duress:
solitary, bereaved, abandoned, yet somehow unleashed. The absorbing intimacy of When She Was compels the reader to dwell on sections
as dense, incisive and beautiful as individual poems, forging a drama by turns reflective, conversational, satirical, enraged.
‘There’s no archive for old love’, the book’s narrator claims. This is that archive.”
Author: Hallucinating Foucault. Winner: McKitterick Prize; Dillons First Fiction Award.
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REVIEWS/ COMMENTS...
“In many ways, When She Was inhabits the same internalised, psychologically focused genre as Eimear McBride’s multi-award-winning A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing (Galley Beggar Press, 2013). Like McBride, Petrucci operates through concentrated segments that build a portrait of identity and consciousness in extremis, wielding language itself as propellant as well as vehicle for memory, emotion and identity as they undergo tectonic fracture and reconstitution. On the other hand, while McBride is a white-hot fractural monolith, Petrucci is a cathedral of dappled interiority. When She Was was begun in late 1998 and the writing largely completed by the end of 2004: it has waited over twenty years for its 2026 publication. More unknown founder, then, than late arrival, its adventurous form, variegated references, and psycho-social daring locate Petrucci's prose debut firmly within the contemporary lineage of seriously ambitious, stylistically disarming, 'underivative' literary fiction.” Authorised commentary.
“Petrucci writes the fragmentary novel as if it were an autopsy on the soul. He doesn't just describe a feeling; he provides its chemical formula.” Reader feedback.
“xxxxxxxxxx.” Exxx 182 (June 202y; Pxxxx McXxxxx).