Can you hear me?: A viciously gripping holiday read set during a scorching Italian summer

· Two Roads · Narrated by Matt Addis
5.0
1 review
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5 hr 34 min
Unabridged
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About this audiobook

'A beautiful, stark, poignant account of fear, love and loss' Emma Flint, author of Little Deaths

'A novel that you long to savour because there won't be another one this rich, this compelling, this extraordinarily satisfying for a long, long time' Bret Anthony Johnston, author of Remember Me Like This and a Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award finalist 2017

'Readers will devour this novel in one sitting as I did, then chew over it long after the book is done' Karen Dionne, author of The Marsh King's Daughter

1978.
Ponte, a small community in Northern Italy: peaceful woods, discarded rubbish, a closed-down factory. An unbearably hot summer like many others, wilted flowers and trips to the waterfalls.

Elia Furenti is sixteen, living in a secluded house with his parents, a life so unremarkable that even its moderate unhappiness has been accepted as normal.
That is until the day the beautiful, damaged Anna returns to Ponte and firmly propels Elia to the edge of adulthood.

But then everything starts to unravel.

Elia's father, Ettore, is let go from his job and loses himself in the darkest corners of his mind.
A young boy is murdered, shaking the small community to its core.
And a girl climbs into a van and vanishes in the deep, dark woods...

Translated from Italian by Alex Valente.

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5.0
1 review

About the author

ELENA VARVELLO was born in Turin, Italy, in 1971, and grew up in a small village in the woods not far from her birthplace. In 1996 she completed a Master Degree in Creative Writing at the Scuola Holden in Turin. Since 1999 she has been teaching Creative Writing at the same school. Elena has published two collections of poetry, Perseveranza è salutare and Atlanti, a collection of short stories, L'economia delle cose (nominated for the Premio Strega, the Italian equivalent of the Man Booker Prize, winner of the Settembrini Award and the Bagutta Opera Prima Award), and two novels, La luce perfetta del giorno and La vita felice, translated into English as Can you hear me?, published in UK (English PEN Award 2017), USA, France, Spain and Poland and soon to be published in Portugal and Greece. She still lives in that small village with her husband and their two sons. elenavarvello.com ALEX VALENTE is a half-Tuscan, half-Yorkshire, all European freelance teacher and translator. He is the co-editor of online publication The Norwich Radical, has a penchant for comics, poetry, and speculative fiction, and can be found on Twitter as @DrFumetts.

ALEX VALENTE is a half-Tuscan, half-Yorkshire, all European freelance teacher and translator. He is the co-editor of online publication The Norwich Radical, has a penchant for comics, poetry, and speculative fiction, and can be found on Twitter as @DrFumetts.

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