Synopsis

It's 1951. In a small farmhouse in the Polesine countryside, where thunderstorms suddenly swallow the bright skies and the corn grows tall and impenetrable, live Norma and Nilde, two cousins ​​who grew up as sisters after a wartime bombing killed their mothers. Nilde is a reserved and fearful girl, and her anxiety increases when Norma begins to behave strangely. Ever since she fell from her bicycle while picking cherries, her cousin no longer seems the same: she disappears for no reason every time a thunderstorm breaks, she's sullen, she won't speak to her, even preventing her from approaching. Nilde tries to follow her through the fields, listens to the rumors circulating in the village, but can't understand why her Norma, her guiding light in life, as beautiful as the Madonna of the Magnificat that their mothers so revered, is doing this to her. What drives Norma to distance herself from Nilde and flee like a wild beast at the first clap of thunder? What happened that afternoon along the riverbank? Why such a sudden chasm of silence and lies between them? The unbreakable bond that binds the two protagonists will be severely tested by disturbing apparitions and inexplicable escapes in a disturbing story of absences and mystery. In the background, a magnetic land, as treacherous as the river that flows through it: the Po that makes it fertile but sometimes overwhelms it only to take it all back. An intense and visionary book capable of plumbing the secrets of nature and the human soul. The extraordinary debut of a very young author.