Synopsis
In the hottest summer of the twentieth century, in a down-at-the-heels hamlet in rural Italy, six children take to their bikes across the scorched countryside. When they arrive at an abandoned farmhouse, one of them, nine-year-old Michele Amitrano, discovers what appears to be the body of a boy his own age. He is too frightened to tell his friends, and his father refuses to listen. When he returns to the site and discovers that the boy is weak but alive, he brings the boy food and water, and learns the terrifying tale of a kidnapping. Told through the eyes of Michele, the story follows his efforts to draw upon his own humanity as the adults around him reveal their increasingly compromised choices.
The New Yorker
Ammaniti is one of Italy's most acclaimed younger writers, and this carefully constructed thriller is the first of his books to appear here. During a piercingly hot summer, a few kilometres from a bone-dry hamlet in rural Tuscany, a shy, nervy, nine-year-old boy called Michele explores a derelict house and discovers, under moldering leaves, a horrifying secret. The novel is saved from sensationalism by Ammaniti's almost cinematic ability to conjure detail -- the look of scraps of meat on a plate, the sheen of a new bike, the whispers of adults in the night -- and by his utterly convincing re-creation of a child's perspective, as Michele's discovery propels him into ever more uncertain territory.