Thirteen-year-old Agostino is spending the summer at a Tuscan seaside resort with his beautiful widowed mother. When she takes up with a cocksure new companion, Agostino, feeling ignored & unloved, begins hanging around with a group of local young toughs. Though repelled by their squalor & brutality, & repeatedly humiliated for his weakness & ignorance when it comes to women & sex, the boy is increasingly, masochistically drawn to the gang & its rough games. He finds himself unable to make sense of his troubled feelings. Hoping to be full of manly calm, he is instead beset by guilty curiosity & an urgent desire to sever, at any cost, the thread of troubled sensuality that binds him to his mother. Alberto Moravia`s classic, startling portrait of innocence lost was written in 1942 but rejected by Fascist censors & not published until 1944, when it became a best seller & secured the author the first literary prize of his career. Revived here in a new translation by Michael F. Moore, Agostino is poised to captivate a twenty-first-century audience.