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Ischia is Burning
Paperback
Mystery & ThrillerGeneral Fiction
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: May 10 2026
Pages: 578
Weight: 1.46
Height: 1.29 Width: 5.50 Depth: 8.50
Language: English
In a hidden basin on the Italian island of Ischia, fourteen children have been raised since infancy in a constructed dialect, on a diet calibrated to a single experiment, by four scientists who have told them nothing about the world beyond the basin's rim. It is September 1986. The children are dying. The forty-seven-year-old Dutch physician who has lived among them for eighteen years has begun to recognize what she has been refusing to name.
Ischia is Burning is a novel about complicity, erasure, and the moral arithmetic of people who decide in private that the children's good is the project's good and that no one else is qualified to judge. Mezzavia, the basin, is invented. Its instruments are not. Beneath every chapter sit documented anchors: the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, the Willowbrook hepatitis program, Decree 770 of the Socialist Republic of Romania, the Sigonella crisis of October 1985, and the radiobiology of cesium-137.
The novel is composed from a 1990 screenplay the author wrote in his second year at Columbia University's School of the Arts and never produced. Reproduced in full as Addendum I, the screenplay sits at the back of the book. A reader can therefore see, in one volume, what thirty-six years of the same writer's thinking did to the same story.
For readers of W.G. Sebald, Ian McEwan, Don DeLillo, and Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem. For anyone who has ever asked how an experiment of this kind could continue, day by day, for eighteen years, without being stopped.
A novel of medical betrayal, atomic erasure, and the people who decided the basin should never appear on any map.
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