Two of Italy's most promising young novelists show that, while the country may be enduring political turmoil and economic hardship, its writers are gliding as elegantly as swans through troubled waters.

Both writers stand out for the grace of their language, but it is Roman journalist Andrea Bajani in particular who marries his exquisitely sensitive prose with a tough and often witty grasp of modern life. Every Promise is the story of a young couple who split up because of the anguish of not being able to conceive a child. In the wake of this parting, the novel's engaging narrator Pietro quietly falls apart. His emotional disintegration is not helped when he discovers his girlfriend has quickly become pregnant, from a casual encounter. That she turns to his mother for help creates a triangle of old and new tensions, and makes life for Pietro even more difficult.

It's around this time that he befriends an old and lonely man, who slowly reveals his painful past as a soldier in Russia. His experiences resurrect memories of Pietro's grandfather, who was a prisoner of war in a Russian camp, and thereafter, when he came home, spent most of his life in a hospital for the mentally ill. As the old and young man grow close, so does the past, and what it asks of each of them.

Bajani's tone is one of youthful intensity. One could not fail to warm to Pietro, nor to pity his plight. A man who makes friends easily and generously, who is kind to the little boy on his apartment block, and is close to his parents, Pietro represents a very contemporary sort of Italian male, one shorn of the machismo of previous generations and thus, one suspects, far more vulnerable.

A melancholy but big-hearted tale, Every Promise is lit by Bajani's delightfully observant and tender eye. Adept at conjuring the beauty of the banal, he writes, for instance, of preparing a microwave dinner for the old man and himself: "Olmo and I would watch the lasagne turning round and round behind the glass like a ballerina in a carillon, until the bell rang." A page in which he imagines his mother driving a car for the first time in years is a perfect character cameo, both insightful and droll, while his portrait of his parents sending text messages should be archived under comedy: "Then when the message was sent, they would both take off their glasses, lean back exhausted against the cushions, the mobile abandoned a little further away. So these messages would reach me worn out, sometimes even blank, sent without words, like an aeroplane that had taken off without passengers, and the passengers still below watching it go away."

The plot of Every Promise is nicely attenuated, nothing rushed, everything deeply felt. By its conclusion what remains of this poignant work is the quality of the writing and the characters. This is a young man's novel, its hurts and uncertainties captured with refreshingly thoughtful angst. If Bajani's prose is already this potent, one wonders what he will achieve in years to come.

The same can be said of Mariapia Veladiano's novella, A Life Apart. Winner of the Calvino prize, this is a slight but haunting work, the product of a questioning, angry imagination that dresses its ideas in a voice so purposefully elegant it feels almost brittle. Unlike Bajani, Veladiano's story has an otherworldly air, despite being set in the modern day. The story of an exceptionally ugly little girl, who is a gifted pianist, it recounts her isolated existence in a grand Italian house, where she and her handsome doctor father and their servant tiptoe around her mother, a beauty who is profoundly depressed.

"Very young girls think they can become anything: princesses, doctors, teachers, actresses. An ugly child knows she will always be just ugly," says her heroine, Rebecca, a girl cruelly starved of love, and joy, who makes an unlikely friend in another outcast child.

Gracefully written, its sensitive, sing-song style is a little too mannered for this reader's taste. There is a fairytale quality to this story, but what first appears to be a morality tale about today's obsession with looks is lifted far above this by the calibre of its prose and the resilience of its very likeable heroine.