Heaven and Earth
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- 3,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
'A devastating marvel of a novel'
Sunday Telegraph
'A highly enjoyable novel... Giordano is especially good on the textures, smells, heat and colours of the Italian south. These stay long in the mind, as does the way he writes about the obsessiveness of love, the way it dominates and distorts and the self-delusions and fantasies it gives rise to'
TLS
'If you're pining for an Italian break, then this might be the remedy: Heaven And Earth is rooted so deep in idyllic Puglia that you can almost feel the red soil under your sandals'
Daily Mail
'Raw and evocative: a breathtaking and poignant creation that will leave you itching under the skin'
Herald
'A stunning achievement'
André Aciman, author of Call Me By Your Name
'Perfect, moving, honest, brilliant, with characters who feel like old friends'
Andrew Sean Greer, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Less
'The perfect novel. Paolo Giordano is one of the handful of great writers working anywhere today'
Edmund White
Every summer Teresa follows her father to his childhood home in Puglia, down in the heel of Italy, a land of relentless, shimmering heat, centuries-old olive groves and taciturn, proud people. There Teresa spends long afternoons enveloped in a sun-struck stupor, reading her grandmother's cheap crime paperbacks.
Everything changes the summer she meets the three boys who live on the masseria next door: Nicola, Tommaso and Bern - the man Teresa will love for the rest of her life. Raised like brothers on a farm that feels to Teresa almost suspended in time, the three boys share a complex, intimate and seemingly unassailable bond.
But no bond is unbreakable and no summer truly endless, as Teresa soon discovers.
Because there is resentment underneath the surface of that strange brotherhood, a twisted kind of love that protects a dark secret. And when Bern - the enigmatic, restless gravitational centre of the group - commits a brutal act of revenge, not even a final pilgrimage to the edge of the world will be enough to bring back those perfect, golden hours in the shadow of the olive trees.
PRAISE FOR PAOLO GIORDANO
'Mesmerizing... Giordano works with piercing subtlety' New York Times
'Elegant and fiercely intelligent' Elle
'Elegiac, tender and mournful' Wall Street Journal
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Giordano's extraordinary novel of fateful friendships and obsessive love (after The Solitude of Prime Numbers) revolves around an Italian woman's memories of her summers in Puglia in the late 1990s. Teresa Gasparro is 14 and on one of her annual summer visits from Turin to her grandmother's house in the small village of Speziale when she gets her first glimpse of the three boys who will change her life. Brothers Bern and Tommaso Coriano, and cousin Nicola Belpanno, live next door in a farmhouse and sneak in at night to swim naked in the villa's pool. As Teresa gets to know the boys, she is invited to the farmhouse, which turns out to be home to a Christian sect that believes in reincarnation of all living things. Teresa is drawn instantly to Bern and constantly thinks about him and his world while back at school throughout the years, and during the summer she turns 17, they consummate their relationship. Before she leaves, she asks Bern to kiss her in front of the other boys, and the awkwardness reveals intense jealousy. Giordano then shifts to 2012, when Teresa reconnects with Tomasso, reflects on the disappearance of the other two from their lives, and learns the dark details of the boys' past. Lush regional details, indelible characters, and a riveting story line make this an overwhelmingly emotional read. Giordano's captivating tale is a magnificent testament to the lingering impact of a charged romance.
