Synopsis

A Slovenian-speaking family from Friuli caught in the grip of the eastern border. A soldier father and a petite woman, strong as a thousand men, torn apart by the First World War, along with her three children, from their homeland in the name of a collective and family destiny marked by the defeat of Caporetto and the rise of border fascism, evoking unquenched mysteries and vendettas. Maurizio Mattiuzza, in his powerful narrative debut, reveals a gripping choral story, inspired by that of his ancestors, intertwining the lives, loves, clashes, and deaths of a battle for existence that begins near Udine in the early years of the last century, continues during the twenty-year period with the ethnic brutality of the Border Regime, and ends in Gela on the night of the Allied landings in 1943, where Giovanni Sbaiz, the book's protagonist, is called to fight.