Giovanni's Gift
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
The domestic bliss of an architect and his wife is threatened by an unseen tormentor in this literary thriller by the award-winning author of The Forgers.
When Grant’s marriage begins to fall apart, he reflects upon the perfect lives of his uncle Henry and aunt Edmé, self-sufficient intellectuals who live blissfully together in a home built by Henry in the high Rocky Mountains. But when Henry and Edmé tell Grant of the terrible nighttime incidents that occurred on their property and culminated in the gruesome murder of one of their close friends, Grant moves in with them to help save an ideal he holds dear.
Giovanni’s Gift is a modern reinvention of the myth of Pandora’s box, and a harrowing meditation on the allure of the American landscape—and the menace that lurks beneath the beauty of its surfaces.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In the memorable Trinity Fields, Morrow evoked wild Western landscapes magnificently, in all their glorious weathers and shifting lights. He does so again in this tale of an elderly architect and his wife, living quietly in a remote mountain valley, whose lives are suddenly and violently disrupted by horrendous noises breaking the silent nights. Enter their nephew, narrator Grant, a young drifter who seems permanently in romantic heat, and who has just separated, in Rome, from his second wife. An anxious call brings him back to Ash Creek, the only steady home he has ever known, and he begins to try to seek out the source of the malevolent nocturnal disturbances. He also falls for beautiful Helen, whose father, Giovanni Trentas, a friend of Uncle Henry and Aunt Edme, met a violent end in the valley some years before. It soon becomes apparent that a beautiful cigar box in which Giovanni kept souvenirs and mysterious scraps of diary (and which gives this book its gorgeous cover) hides dark secrets about his death, a long-buried romance and Helen's real parentage. The reader is on to most of this before Grant apparently is, and the circuitous way in which he comes to his discoveries, coupled with his oddly shifty nature, considerably slackens what should have been a much tenser narrative. Somehow, the human drama never lives up to the epic quality of Morrow's prose, and the book, for all its beauties and some passages of fine romantic ardor, never quite comes to life. Author tour.
