Description
Book SynopsisVincenzo Chironi sets foot for the first time on the island of Sardinia - ''a raft in the middle of the Mediterranean'' - in 1943, a year of famine and malaria. All he has with him is an old document as proof of his name and date of birth, but to find out who he really is he has had to undertake an even more stressful journey than the one he has just faced in the steamer from mainland Italy to Sardinia. At Núoro he will find his grandfather, a master blacksmith, who will act as a substitute father but also as an accomplice to him, and his aunt Marianna, who greets the unexpected arrival of a previously unknown nephew as an opportunity to redeem a life previously afflicted by misfortune.
Years later, when the presence of Vincenzo Chironi in Núoro seems to have become taken for granted, as natural as the sea and rocks, his blood asserts itself. Vincenzo meets Cecilia, a beautiful girl with eyes of an undefinable shade who is a wartime refugee from elsewhere in Sardinia, and fal
Trade Review
Immediate and intense . . . Fois is fearless in showing emotion . . . his descriptions [are] so vivid the sun-baked dust catches your throat. . . . Quietness and fury are powerfully combined. -- Rosemary Goring * Glasgow Herald. *
It is a long time since I last came across a writer with such a deep, poetic sense of nature and the ability to convey it. * Andrea Camilieri *
