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What Hell Is Not (Fiction in Translation)

What Hell Is Not (Fiction in Translation)

by Alessandro D'Avenia (Author), Jeremy Parzen (Translator)

  • Used

    Hardcover 2019

    $3.45
Synopsis

A heart-rending story of deprivation and resilience in mafia-run Palermo

`Take away love and you will have hell, you used to say to me, Don Pino. Give love and you will have what hell is not.'

Federico is a privileged teenager from Palermo. He is preparing to spend a summer learning English in Oxford when his teacher, Father Pino, asks him to help out at a youth centre in an area of Palermo dominated by mafia and misery. To his parents' dismay, Federico decides to follow Father Pino into the darkness of Palermo's alleyways.

Far removed from his familiar surroundings, Federico begins to learn from the incredibly tough lives of the children who attend the youth centre, and also from Lucia, a beautiful girl full of courage and light. Then one day, Father Pino is murdered by the mafia, and the hope for Palermo and its beauty are entrusted to Federico's young hands.

Alessandro D'Avenia, himself a student of Father `Pino' Puglisi at this high school, draws a powerful, unforgettable portrait of an extraordinary and contradictory city, of a society suffocated by silence yet capable of incomparable acts of courage.

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More Information

Format: Hardcover
 Pages: 368
 Edition: Hardback
 Publisher: Oneworld Publications
Published: 24 Jan 2019
ISBN 10: 1786072750
ISBN 13: 9781786072757

Media Reviews
`A mature work that looks the theme of evil and violence in the eye.' * Libero *
`The dark story of Father Pino's passion and death is a long shriek of grief, but it is not in vain: it is also a hymn to love that becomes beauty.' * Antonia Arslan, author of Skylark Farm *
Author Bio
Alessandro D'Avenia teaches Ancient Greek, Latin and Italian Literature at a high school in Milan and is a regular contributor to the newspaper Corriere della Sera, writing on the subjects of literature and education. His debut novel, White as Milk, Red as Blood, was translated into twenty-two languages and turned into a film. Together with his second novel, it spent three years on the Italian fiction top ten bestseller list, selling more than one million copies in Italy alone. What Hell Is Not is his third novel. Jeremy Parzen studied Italian at UCLA. He is a translator, blogger, musician and wine writer. He lives in Houston, Texas.