Description

The award-winning literary thriller from one of Italy’s most exciting feminist writers, for fans of Sophie Mackintosh, Elena Ferrante and Sarah Moss

One morning, a teacher disappears into the woods. As whispers fill her classroom and relatives scour the streets, she melts into a wild landscape – a darkly entrancing place where boars roam free, silver birches tower overhead and the air is filled with ancient bird calls. Sinking into a bed of moss, she tries to escape the shocking news of a pupil’s death.

Back in town, behind shuttered windows and on factory floors, the mystery takes hold. Who is Silvia really? A teacher of rare kindness, living outside of other people’s expectations, or a solitary misfit without a family to call her own? When a local child stumbles upon her hiding place, it seems like the search might be over. But what happens when the missing do not want to be found?

PRAISE FOR UNTOLD LESSONS:

‘Vivid, beguiling and needle-sharp . . . stirs our darkest impulses’ Lucy Rose, author of The Lamb

‘Mysterious and elegant, full of fears and tenderness’ Veronica Raimo, author of Lost on Me

‘Satisfying and deeply felt’ Irish Times

‘A beautifully crafted feminist fable’ World Literature Today

‘An intense literary thriller that subverts expectations’ Dazed

Publisher Review

‘A mysterious and elegant novel, full of fears and tenderness, where getting lost in the woods can be a choice and a destiny and a regeneration’ – Veronica Raimo, author of Lost on Me

‘Maddalena Vaglio Tanet captivates us from the very first sentence and then carries us away with her olive-green language, telling through her stirring style the depths of fear and breadth of the human heart. As if Elena Ferrante’s heroines had come to the barren northern Italy to find themselves caught between tender longings and bitter disappointments’ – Floran Illies