Synopsis

August 1942. For months, Tommaso has been waiting for the big town festival, where he and Camillo can admire the magicians, the fire-eater, and the stalls selling new toys. The two friends are joined by Lia, the prettiest girl in class, with whom Camillo spends his days diving into bales of hay and chasing each other across the fields. But Lia is the daughter of Gerardo Draghi, the fascist leader who, with his band of blackshirts, dominates the area and exercises his domineering influence even within the walls of La Valle, the Draghi family's manor house. The same house where, fifty years later, two other children, Luca and Lidia, will play among the now-ruined rooms, confronting the monsters of their imagination and the ghosts that still haunt those places. Against the backdrop of the Piacenza countryside, with its delicate hues and archaic contours, the stories of a forgotten past and a present tasked with exorcising its violence intertwine. In "Volo di paglia," Laura Fusconi demonstrates a style that is both lyrical and playful, like the child protagonists, who are haunted by the shadows of the adult world and its secrets. This is a debut novel in which attention to childhood and its imagination translates into writing of great sensitivity and precision.