English sample available

Elia Legasov has inherited the family business: he is a snow sweeper in a town immersed in whiteness.

But, one day, the snow betrays him by yielding from its depths something that should have remained buried and forgotten. Elia consequently has to remember and start to question everything.

Elia Legasov was born in a town surrounded by whiteness and has never left.

His job is to shovel snow and clear streets along which nobody walks until the snow reveals something from its depths. Something connected to Elia’s family and all that was supposed to remain buried. From that moment on, Elia’s mind becomes crowded with memories he had suppressed: memories of a father who died many years ago and a mother who left for ever.

This makes Elia believe what people say about his family: that the snow does not protect them but, on the contrary, puts them to the test to see if they are capable of forgetting, because everybody forgets. But the Legasovs remember, always.

It is now Elia’s turn to remember, whatever the cost. Because grief creates the winter, only every winter is different from the one before and the one before that.

pp.160

Jonathan and Michele meet on a flight to Gran Canaria.
Michele has been one of Italian TV’s most famous ventriloquists. Jonathan is a frail boy.
They have one thing in common: no one has ever noticed their lives.
A story that explores the power of bonds and the search for oneself.

Two destinies meet on a flight to Gran Canaria: Michele Prato, an elderly former ventriloquist, a one-way ticket in his pocket, and Jonathan, a twenty-year-old whose earphones run out of charge, forcing him to open up to the outside world. They happen to sit next to each other by chance, and a trip turns into a moment of revelation.

Jonathan has many questions and Michele is a good listener. Perhaps because he, too, was a lonely child who had to fly on the wings of imagination to make up for absences and nostalgia. But Michele has a secret, or rather the secret, the very reason he is on this plane: a distant memory. Because maybe, in order to really love, we don’t need to be near the other person, but just think about them. Because the point isn’t leaving, but arriving.

pp.144