The Swallows of Lunetto

From Joseph Fasano, the acclaimed author of The Dark Heart of Every Wild Thing, comes The Swallows of Lunetto, the powerful story of a young couple's escape from Italian fascism at the end of the Second World War.

"As essential as Hannah Arendt in understanding history and the heart." —Pietro Federico

"This journey through Italy of the 1940s, with its terror of fascism and its historical reckoning, is especially meaningful in this moment, reminding us of our own terrifying, impossible world. Fasano is a writer of special, different bravery, and The Swallows of Lunetto is a dream of a book." —Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic and Dancing in Odessa

Italy, 1945: Alexandra Bianchi lives and works in Lunetto, a provincial village in Italy's Calabria region, which finds itself ravaged by war. Leonardo Gemetti, a young man from Lunetto, has been missing for nearly eight years, and all his village knows of him is that he has carried out an atrocity against the Italian partisans in Mussolini's fallen Republic of Salò. When Alexandra meets a masked figure in the streets of Lunetto, she cannot imagine what she will learn about history and her place in it.

A sweeping love story and historical drama, The Swallows of Lunetto is a timely meditation on the left-right political divide, the reckonings of inherited trauma, and the potential of forgiveness to heal deeply divisive wounds.