Search results for ""Author Erri De Luca""

One morning, high in the Dolomite mountains, two hikers are some distance apart. The path in places is narrow and perilous. One man falls to his death. The other sounds the alarm. But these men are not strangers. Members of the same revolutionary group forty years earlier, the first had betrayed the second, who must now hold his own against a young magistrate intent upon having him tried for murder.Was their meeting an improbable encounter, or an impossible coincidence?Impossible is a brilliant hymn to the lure of the mountains, an engrossing illumination of political brotherhood, and also the subtlest of detective stories.

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***Longlisted for the CWA Crime in Translation Dagger 2023***"If there's an entry point into the work of the enduring, award-winning Italian writer Erri De Luca, then N.S. Thompson's excellent translation is surely it ... Thoughtful and wise about life and landscape, it's the most cerebral of whodunnits" Ben East, Observer Two men go walking in the Dolomites, but not together; one falls to his death, the other reports the body. Is it coincidence that they knew each other in earlier years, and that one had betrayed the other?Impossible is at once a game of cat-and-mouse in which the prisoner, a survivor of a left-wing cadre now long dispersed, holds his own. Nor is he crushed by his solitary confinement from which he communicates with his distant beloved. This novel is a brilliant hymn to the lure of the mountains, an engrossing illumination of political brotherhood, and also the subtlest of detective stories.

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'Happiness - was it right to name it without knowing it? It sounded shameless in my mouth, like when someone shows off about knowing a celebrity and just uses their first name, saying Marcello when they really mean Mastroianni ...'A young orphan boy grows up in Naples, playing football, roaming the city's streets and hidden places. The older boys call him 'monkey' because he can climb anywhere. He is alone, apart from Don Gaetano, the apartment caretaker, who feeds him, teaches him to play scopa, and tells him stories about women, history and the dark secrets of Naples' past. Then one day the boy sees a young girl standing at a window. It is an encounter that will haunt his life for years and, eventually, shape his destiny. Lyrical and exuberant, told with the simplicity of a fairy tale and the intensity of a memory, The Day Before Happiness is the story of friendship, a city and what makes us who we are.

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