The weight of truth in Daniela Dawan's "The guilt of keeping silent"

Each of us creates our own comfort zone, an artificial paradise sometimes more akin to a prison, but one where we don't fully confront our own shortcomings, our limitations, our fears. Each of us has something we don't even say to ourselves, something unspeakable even when we're silent, alone with our thoughts. Jacopo Cardoso, the protagonist of "La colpa di tacere" (Morellini, 2026, €18.00, 178 pages. Also available as an ebook), the new novel by Daniela Dawan, is no exception.

Cardoso is a Supreme Court judge. Above all, he is a rigorous and tormented man. Accustomed to navigating within the confines of the law rather than establishing the truth of the facts, he experiences a crisis when he finds himself involved in a proceeding that concerns the very meaning of justice. Entrusted with the appeal of the Prati del Vezza massacre, a fictional location inspired by actual massacres committed during the Nazi-Fascist occupation, Jacopo is confronted with yellowed case files and harrowing testimonies that reveal unexpected connections to his family history: his father, celebrated as a hero, perhaps an accomplice, his elderly mother, much loved, the guardian of a painful memory never elaborated. Retracing decades-old events, Cardoso reveals a fracture that also permeates his private life, built on the silence and lies that sustain his public identity.

Confronted with the collective memory of an Italy marked by war and the Resistance, Jacopo is forced to question what he has always avoided: how much does silence weigh? Can one be just in an unjust world? Legality and justice, historical memory and individual responsibility, public identity and private truth collide. As family secrets are gradually revealed, Jacopo must choose whether to remain a prisoner of lies or risk everything for the truth. But what price is he willing to pay to free himself from the guilt of silence?

With "The Guilt of Silence," Daniela Dawan writes a powerful novel in which a judicial investigation, family drama, and the protagonist's journey of personal emancipation intertwine in a tale charged with moral tension until the very last page. The book is structured as an investigation into the relationship between legality and justice, between public and private truth, between historical memory and individual responsibility. In the end, the reader may not receive answers written in stone, but is confronted with open-ended, yet essential and universal, questions: on the burden of denied identities, on the transmission of guilt and memory, and on the individual and public cost of truth. Because truth sets us free, but it can inevitably hurt and almost certainly destroy something... or someone.