Description

‘Insinuating, haunting and lyrically pervasive’ The New York Times Book Review

A new translation by Tim Parks

Twenty years after making his fortune in America, Eel is drawn back to the closest thing he has to a home: the Piedmontese countryside where he grew up poor and illegitimate. Wandering the valleys and vineyards with his childhood friend Nuto, Eel remembers the farm where he worked, his employer’s beautiful daughters, the rituals of rural life. Yet as he discovers more about what happened there during the war, he realizes that these timeless landscapes hide terrible, savage secrets. By turns fond and evocative, seductive and troubling, The Moon and the Bonfires is a lyrical masterpiece of memory and betrayal.

Translated with an Introduction by Tim Parks

Publisher Review

The Moon and the Bonfires [is Pavese's] masterpiece on the aftermath of the partisan war in the hills around Turin * The Daily Telegraph * Insinuating, haunting and lyrically pervasive * The New York Times Book Review * Cesare Pavese's cool, contemplative voice was the most important among postwar Italian writers -- W. S. DiPiero Pavese's nine short novels make up the most dense, dramatic, and homogeneous narrative cycle of modern Italy ... But above all they are works of an extraordinary depth where one never stops finding new levels, new meanings -- Italo Calvino Pavese is one of the few essential novelists of the mid-twentieth century -- Susan Sontag