Child's play?

Simona Vinci's first novel begs the question: what type of reader did she have in mind when she wrote it? A Game We Play tells the stomach-turning story of a hot summer in the lives of a group of five Italian children, who experiment with each other's sexuality in a secret den they've made.

15-year-old Mirko is the leader, the one who rounds them up in the evenings and who provides the increasingly hard-core porn literature that "inspires" their experiments. Martina, Greta and Matteo are 10. Luca is 14. Over the summer, Martina and Greta are raped constantly. Mirko wants to make money by taking pictures to sell to paedophiles, who supply him with the S&M magazines. The result is Greta's ghastly death, caused by buggery with the handle of a tennis racket. The lives of the others are clearly ruined also.

Unsurprisingly, Vinci's novel has provoked one hell of a controversy in Italy. She herself has said she wanted to write about children's sexuality, to explore taboos, and expose the secret lives that children lead when unobserved by adults. Using a work of literature to examine such sensitive topics is a dangerous gamble: there's no social commentary here, for instance, that wouldn't be better conveyed by a piece of investigative journalism.

The fact is that this profoundly depressing novel will certainly attract voyeuristic readers who have little interest in literature and a lot of interest in the dark world of child sexual abuse. Are authors really so desperate for readers these days?

Rosita Boland is an author and journalist