Fine Young People author Anna Bruno Credit: Photo: Courtesy of KTK Publicity

Anna Bruno’s best friend, Leena, is flying in from Chicago to attend her upcoming book launch at Penguin Bookshop in Sewickley — and not just because the two have known each other since middle school. Bruno dedicated her new novel, Fine Young People, to Leena, and the gesture underscores the work’s focus on friendship, in all its complicated, enduring, and deeply formative power.

Bruno, who now lives in Iowa City, Iowa, and teaches writing at the University of Iowa, returns to Pittsburgh on Sat., Aug. 2, to celebrate the release of her second novel during an event at Penguin Bookshop.

Set in the fictional Catholic school of St. Ignatius in Sewickley, Fine Young People presents a mystery that unfolds across prep school hallways, confessionals, hockey rinks, and Strip District sidewalks. The story follows 20-year-old Francesca “Frankie” Paladino as she investigates the unsolved murder of her former classmate, Wolf, unraveling secrets that trace back nearly two decades.

The book toggles between past and present, slowly revealing the tensions and loyalties within a tightly bonded group of teenagers as they navigate privilege, pressure, and betrayal. But for Bruno, the most meaningful relationship on the page isn’t romantic or even familial — it’s the one between Frankie and her best friend, Shiv.

“When I finished, it sort of struck me as really a novel about friendship in a lot of ways,” Bruno tells Pittsburgh City Paper. “The friendship between Frankie and Shiv, to me, is the most important relationship in the novel.”

It’s also one of the most enduring. Bruno imagines Shiv as someone who will still be in Frankie’s life well after graduation, just as Leena remains a constant in hers. The two met in middle school and later attended Shadyside Academy together. Though they now live in different cities, their bond has remained strong, and that kind of lasting closeness became a core inspiration for Fine Young People.

Bruno didn’t initially set out to write a murder mystery. The novel began, she says, with a setting: a prep school in Pittsburgh, inspired by her memories of Shadyside Academy. She was drawn to the physical beauty of school campuses and the intensity of adolescence, an emotional terrain she found rich with narrative possibility. As she developed the story, however, the theme of institutional decay emerged.

“I was kind of writing about the spiritual death of the community,” Bruno explains. “And that sort of took the form of a murder.”

In constructing the fictional St. Ignatius, Bruno chose Sewickley not for its affluence — Fox Chapel or Shadyside would have fit that bill — but for its walkable downtown, architectural character, and small-town feel.

“There isn’t a real sense of town [in Fox Chapel]. You kind of drive to the mall,” says Bruno. By contrast, Sewickley gave her characters a physical world to move through: a Starbucks to meet at, a deli to grab lunch, streets to wander with teenage aimlessness and significance.

Although she wrote most of the novel in Iowa, Bruno returns to Pittsburgh regularly and walks the streets of Sewickley, soaking in the atmosphere. She’s also been known to take her two young kids on literary research adventures, riding the incline and visiting the Strip just like her characters do, giving the book a sense of lived-in specificity.

Still, what lingers isn’t the setting but the emotional resonance. Frankie’s voice — retrospective and clear-eyed, thanks to Bruno’s decision to place her in college rather than high school — carries the reader through layers of grief, guilt, and complicated love.

“There’s a big difference between the voice of a high schooler and the voice of a college student,” Bruno says. “You kind of mature in those years … so I really wanted to let Frankie have the depth of a few years of college where she can look back on herself and kind of laugh.”

In doing so, Frankie becomes a narrator with perspective; a young woman reexamining the myths of her youth, her community, and her friendships. And while the murder mystery offers suspense and closure (of a sort), the book’s true resolution lies in the bonds that remain. “You can be friends with someone as a teenager and a kid and then grow up and 30 years later still have them in your life,” Bruno says. “That’s my experience.”

The Penguin Bookshop event will be a homecoming in more ways than one. In addition to her childhood best friend, Bruno will be joined in conversation by her former English teacher and soccer coach, Buddy Hendershot, a reunion of mentor and mentee that echoes the novel’s themes of return, memory, and connection.

Bruno’s debut novel, Ordinary Hazards, was set in upstate New York. Her next work-in-progress includes scenes in San Francisco. But Fine Young People is unmistakably a Pittsburgh book, both in geography and in spirit. It’s a story of what we carry forward from our teenage years: the places, the wounds, the unanswered questions, and, perhaps most lastingly, the people we never really leave behind.