Can you hear me?: A gripping holiday read set during a scorching Italian summer

Description

'Utterly gripped me from beginning to end' Victoria Hislop | 'Move over Ferrante, there's a new Elena in town' Independent | 'There is much beauty and sadness in this slim novel' The Times | 'A novel of crime and darkness that eschews straightforward domestic noir' Guardian In the August of 1978, the summer I met Anna Trabuio, my father took a girl into the woods... I was sixteen. He had been gone a long time already, but that was it - not even a year after he lost his job and that boy disappeared - that was when everything broke. 1978. Ponte, a small community in Northern Italy. An unbearably hot summer like many others. Elia Furenti is sixteen, living an unremarkable life of moderate unhappiness, until the day the beautiful, damaged Anna returns to Ponte and firmly propels Elia to the edge of adulthood. But then everything starts to unravel. Elia's father, Ettore, is let go from his job and loses himself in the darkest corners of his mind. A young boy is murdered. And a girl climbs into a van and vanishes in the deep, dark woods... Translated by Alex Valente | Winner of an English PEN Award.

ELENA VARVELLO was born in Turin, Italy, in 1971, and grew up in a small village in the woods not far from her birthplace. In 1996 she completed a Master Degree in Creative Writing at the Scuola Holden in Turin. Since 1999 she has been teaching Creative Writing at the same school. Elena has published two collections of poetry, Perseveranza e salutare and Atlanti, a collection of short stories, L'economia delle cose (nominated for the Premio Strega, the Italian equivalent of the Man Booker Prize, winner of the Settembrini Award and the Bagutta Opera Prima Award), and two novels, La luce perfetta del giorno and La vita felice, translated into English as Can you hear me?, published in UK (English PEN Award 2017), USA, France, Spain and Poland and soon to be published in Portugal and Greece. She still lives in that small village with her husband and their two sons. elenavarvello.com ALEX VALENTE is a half-Tuscan, half-Yorkshire, all European freelance teacher and translator. He is the co-editor of online publication The Norwich Radical, has a penchant for comics, poetry, and speculative fiction, and can be found on Twitter as @DrFumetts.

Can You Hear Me? poignantly touches on problems of friendships, families and coming of age in a small community in northern Italy. There is much beauty and sadness in this slim novel. - Marcel Berlins, The Times 'I love books I can read all in one sitting (maybe with a break to make tea) and can you hear me? by Elena Varvello was one of these. A thriller, a mystery, a coming-of-age story that utterly gripped me from beginning to end - and the translation from the original Italian never for a second gets in the way' - Victoria Hislop, Good Housekeeping Haunting... Set in a small Italian town in the late 1970s, Can You Hear Me? reads like a collaboration between Daphne du Maurier and Megan Abbott, a superb psychological study marinated in a teenage boy's simmering hormones. A poet and award-winning short-story writer in her native Italy, Varvello writes tautly lyrical prose (beautifully translated by Alex Valente), delivering an absorbing tale that draws the reader into a nightmarish fever dream of isolation and paranoia given a chilling sense of inevitability by Varvello's matter-of-fact tone and Elia's deadpan narration. - Declan Burke, Irish Times