Cuore nero

The only way to reach Sassaia, a tiny village nestled in the mountains, is via a steep dirt road hidden among the beech trees. It is from there that Emilia appears one day, with red, frizzy hair, thin as a stick, a thirty-year-old teenager wearing purple combat boots and a fluorescent green jacket. From the house next door, Bruno watches her arrival as if it were an invasion. This woman has a foreign accent and a pile of bags and suitcases: what is she doing up there, far from the rest of the world? When they finally meet, each with their own loneliness, in Emilia’s eyes – ‘devoid of light, like two dead stars’ – Bruno senses an abyss similar to his own, but of the opposite sign. Both have known evil: he because he suffered it, she because she committed it – an evil for which she paid the price with many years in prison, but which cannot be repaired. Sassaia is their escape, the only solution to a future in which they have both stopped believing. But the future arrives and follows its own laws; whether you are guilty or innocent, victim or perpetrator, time passes and reveals us for what we all are: infinitely fragile, fatally human. With the love that only great authors can devote to their characters, Silvia Avallone has written her most mature novel, a story of condemnation and salvation that probes the darkest and deepest cracks in the soul to fill them with compassion, life and light.