The school year is finished, exams are over and summer stretches before seventeen-year-old Federico, full of promise and opportunity. But then he accepts a request from one of his teachers to help out at a youth club in the destitute Sicilian neighbourhood of Brancaccio. This narrow tangle of alleyways is controlled by local mafia thugs, but it is also the home of children like Francesco, Maria, Dario, Tot¿: children with none of Federico's privileges, but with a strength and vitality that changes his life forever.¿

Written in intensely passionate and lyrical prose, What Hell Is Not is the phenomenal Italian bestseller about a man who brought light to one of the darkest corners of Sicily, and who refused to give up on the future of its children.¿