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International Book Awards Finalist
A property harbouring a gruesome secret goes up for sale. Two men —perhaps, the wrong men —are shot in plain daylight. Nothing is what it seems. And matters do not turn out as anticipated. De Angelis, an inscrutable northerner, is travelling to a small town perched somewhere in Sicily’s hinterland to negotiate a real estate transaction, only to find himself embroiled in a criminal conspiracy. While en route, the train he’s on mysteriously breaks down, forcing him to spend the night in a squalid whistle stop. What follows is a web of unsettling events, involving child prostitution and brazen killings, that lead to the abrupt demise of his business deal. But De Angelis is undeterred and intent on discovering what went wrong with his transaction. As he embarks on a reckless sleuthing, an unexpected turn of events sends him into a tailspin. At the heart of it is an alluring blue-eyed girl, Marinella. The chance encounter with the eleven-year-old traps him in a psychological and moral cul-de-sac, leaving him no choice but to confront the type of man he really is.
Despite De Angelis’ amorality, the fact that he compulsively keeps after his goal even after encountering impediment after impediment, makes him an evocative character… unreliable narrators make for a more intriguing read and this one had me paying equal attention to clues and red herrings, and in the end it was up to me to choose what to believe.
The novel reads like an instant classic, at first conjuring Hemingway’s simple, modern prose, but then revealing something sinister and surreal that would be more at home in Kafka’s wild imagination.
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236 Pages
8in * 4.9in * 0.7in
260gr
May 01, 2020
Hamilton
CA
9781771834544
eng