When Giuseppe Mundula first sees Michele Angelo Chironi across the corridor of a Sardinian orphanage, the reserved blacksmith realises he has found the son and heir he never knew he needed. And when, a few years later, Michele himself looks down from a church rooftop and sees the beautiful Mercede, the quiet orphan realises he has found the woman he will marry.
So begins Marcello Fois' magisterial domestic epic of the lives and loves of the Chironi family, as they struggle through war and fascism. Deftly endowing familial horrors with mythical resonance, Fois creates a Dantesque triptych that inscribes the history of twentieth-century Sardinia onto a single misbegotten household.
Read More"It is a long time since I last came across a writer with such a deep, poetic sense of nature and the ability to convey it" His descriptive prose is lavish, powerfully evoking time and place . . . Translator Silvester Mazzarella's triumph is to allow the poetry and imagery to flourish without letting it grow wild and tangled - IndependentFois combines a remarkable number of different ways of seeing the world, different forms of storytelling, different kinds of language and different narrative voices . . . Memory of the Abyss is by turns epic, fable, love story and thriller - Observer