<p>A lonely little boy’s unlikely friendship with his grandparents’ grizzled old groundskeeper leads him down the rabbit hole from a life lived solely in books to a wonderful and terrifying hell of long-buried secrets, shadowy partisans, murdered Nazis, thefts, lies, doppelgängers, bloodthirsty slugs, and the unquiet dead.</p> <p>‘If I were to give a book award to a living Italian writer, man or woman, I'd pick Michele Mari.’ Domenico Starnone, <em>I-Italy</em></p> <p>‘The charm that Mari exercises on his readers, from the most devoted to the most distracted, is incredible . . . More than anyone else, Michele Mari represents today a model of writer that seems on the point of disappearing – fully literary, lofty, in short, twentieth-century.’ Sara Marzullo, <em>Esquire</em></p>