Lesser Islands
-
- $9.99
-
- $9.99
Publisher Description
WINNER: Capalbio International Prize・Carlo Marincovich Prize・2017 PEA Award
An absorbing family saga taking place over four decades and centered on the Tuscan island of Giglio—a seemingly idyllic place where the story of two sisters and the history of Italy meet in unexpected, transformative ways.
A tiny island in the middle of the Mediterranean with fewer than a thousand inhabitants. An older sister, a combative mother, a hedonistic father, a grandmother who fought in the Resistance, a wild younger brother. These are the people and the place that Teresa—the younger daughter and narrator—tries to escape from, eager to find a place in the world that she can call her own.
But soon enough she’ll have to reckon with the island, with the bittersweet distance separating her from her beloved yet domineering sister, and with the long shadow of the darkest moments in Italian history. Guided by nostalgia for the long, bright summer that was her childhood, Teresa will have to confront her condition, perceived or real, as the “lesser” one—accepting herself and rediscovering what she thought she had to escape from.
Between a coming-of-age novel, a family saga, and a parable on the last forty years of Italian history, Lorenza Pieri’s novel is an intense and luminous book, in which language has the magnetic force of the stark, beautiful landscape that has inspired it.
“A luminous voice, of the likes of Elsa Morante and Elena Ferrante.”—Vanity Fair
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Six translators deliver an uneven family saga from Pieri (The Garden of Monsters). During summers on the tiny Italian island of Giglio, in the Tyrrhenian Sea, the parents of narrator Teresa are preoccupied with managing their hotel, so Teresa spends most of her time with her bright but bratty older sister, Caterina. In 1976,when they're young girls, their mother, Elena, coordinates protests against the government's exile of two neofascists charged with a bombing in Milan to the island, efforts that only succeed temporarily. Six years later, Caterina goes to boarding school in Florence, and Teresa picks up on their parents' increasingly strained marriage. During the summer, the sisters recapture a degree of their childhood closeness, but their father's infidelity brings new ruptures to the family. In the final sections, set from the late 1990s through 2012, when the cruise ship Costa Concordia runs aground, Teresa deals with unexpected changes in her life and surprises herself by embracing her family members' devotion to hospitality. The time jumps feel disjointed, and the thread involving the accused bombers is a bit convoluted, though Pieri has a sure hand in conveying Teresa's adolescent unease and curiosity. Pieri's island novel is a bit like island hopping, in that some stops are more rewarding than others.
