Last year, when she was just 23, Viola Di Grado published her fearless first novel, "70% Acrylic, 30% Wool" (Europa Editions, $16), which became a best seller in her native Italy and was short listed for the country's top literary prize, the Strega. This rapid rise was mostly attributed to her shimmering prose. One Italian critic compared it to "Oriental porcelain." But Di Grado also stood out for her strange personal style. She wears black lipstick, a sorceress hood and fingerless lace gloves. Recently, she said, she strung naked baby dolls into a necklace. "Everyone is kind of suspicious," she said in a telephone interview from Rome. But I've always dressed like this. In Sicily, where I grew up, I was constantly insulted for it. But that only made me want to do it more. Di Grado's writing is similarly defiant. Her novel - available next month in an English translation by Michael Reynolds - is set in Leeds, England, a "purulent freckle" of a city where the sky is "the color of a raw chicken thigh." The heroine, the 20-year-old Camelia, is losing her mind. She has her reasons: Camelia's father was killed in a car accident, and her musician mother has turned into a helpless, self-destructive mute. Mother and daughter communicate only through an invented language of glances, one of several linguistic quirks in this novel: others have to do with Chinese ideograms and a sickening affliction called "verbal anorexia." While she briefly finds comfort in friendship, or in sex, Camelia is eventually consumed by her madness, and Di Grado seems to mock the reader for imagining a happier ending. "Use it to mop the bathroom, that story of yours, or I don't know, to line the hamster's cage," she writes. Your comfort does not interest her. "If someone reads the book before bed and then can fall asleep, I think I failed," Di Grado explains. Literature has to make you stop sleeping.