r.vivian literary agency

A handful of bones resurface from the ground. A mountain is about to collapse due to a landslide that threatens the town below and forces many to flee from up there, from the Salti del Diavolo, where they say it's those bones' fault if everything is falling down now, that of that boy who disappeared twenty years earlier and who perhaps would have been better if he had remained buried forever. Sandro Bonardi, someone who grew up in those parts, leaves the city to return to those slopes: he must pay one last homage to the remains of his best friend. The only ones waiting for him are those who don't want to leave that mountain: Bepo the old gamekeeper, Fildura the bartender who liked to teach the kids good manners through the texture of the strap, Paolo the Poet, artist and addict who introduced Sandro to drugs when he was still a young promising footballer. And then Marta, the girl with black hair and empty eyes, Marta with whom he and Bosco were in love, and who now is said to live alone in that little tower up there, at the Salti del Diavolo. Hell, though no one has ever seen her again in the village. So, as the slope begins to shake and the collapse becomes ever more imminent, Sandro confronts his past again, determined to return to that August bank holiday, the day his friend disappeared, sinking into the need to find the answer to a specific question: can you truly ever forgive yourself, when you know there's no way back for all the pain you've caused?