Return to Valetto
A Novel
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- £8.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the Texas Institute of Letters Jesse H. Jones Award for Fiction
A Best Book of the Year: BookPage
A Must-Read: The New York Post and The Christian Science Monitor
“A story of love, loss, and the enduring power of hope. I was transfixed from page one.” ―Lara Prescott, New York Times bestselling author of The Secrets We Kept
From the bestselling author of The Last Painting of Sara de Vos, Dominic Smith’s Return to Valetto tells of a nearly abandoned Italian village, the family that stayed, and long-buried secrets from World War II.
On a hilltop in Umbria sits Valetto. Once a thriving village that survived centuries of earthquakes and landslides and became a hub of resistance and refuge during World War II, it has since been nearly abandoned, as residents sought better lives elsewhere. Only ten remain, including the widows Serafino—three eccentric sisters and their steely centenarian mother—who live quietly in their medieval villa. Then their nephew and grandson, Hugh, a historian, returns.
But someone else has arrived before him, laying claim to the cottage where Hugh spent his childhood summers. The unwelcome guest is the captivating and no-nonsense Elisa Tomassi, who asserts that the family patriarch, Aldo Serafino, a resistance fighter whom her own family harbored, gave the cottage to them in gratitude. But like so many threads of history, this revelation unravels a secret—a betrayal, a disappearance, and an unspeakable act of violence—that has affected Valetto across generations. Who will answer for the crimes of the past?
Dominic Smith’s Return to Valetto is a riveting journey into one family’s dark past, a page-turning excavation of the ruins of history, and a probing look at our commitment to justice in a fragile world. It is also a deeply human and transporting testament to the possibility of love and understanding across gaps of all kinds—even time.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Smith (The Electric Hotel) unspools an intriguing saga of wartime promises and trauma. In 2011, widower Hugh Fisher leaves his home in Michigan for a sabbatical in Valetto, the Umbrian village of his deceased Anglo Italian mother, Hazel. There, he discovers a chef named Elisa Tomassi occupying his mother's cottage, which he inherited. Elisa claims Hugh's resistance fighter grandfather gave it to her family while on his deathbed during WWII. Hugh's three widowed aunts, who never knew what happened to their father, call in lawyers to dispute Elisa's story. Hugh's 99-year-old grandmother, meanwhile, insists Hugh travel to the village where her husband was buried to get to the bottom of things. There, he meets Alessia, Elisa's mother, who spent part of the war as a child refugee in the Serafino villa. Alessia shares the decades-long correspondence she had with Hazel and reveals she and Hazel were tortured by Valetto's sole fascist party member, Silvio Ruffo. Hugh, shaken by what he's uncovered, returns to the villa and schemes with his aunts to confront Silvio, who is still alive at 96. The characters are vividly drawn, and the plot's low-grade tension grows taut as Hugh works himself up to the final showdown. This intelligent family drama will keep readers turning the pages.
