In Umbria, Italy, there sits a hilltop village where time, earthquakes and landslides have left the buildings damaged, and large parts of it simply sheared away. It is all but abandoned but for 10 diehard residents. This includes the widows Serafino – three eccentric sisters and their mother – who live together in their medieval villa. They are preparing to celebrate the 100th birthday of the matriarch when their nephew and grandson, Hugh, a professor and historian of abandoned places, returns for a sabbatical.
Hugh is lost in grieving for his wife and mother and is surprised to find that a cottage in the village has been left to him in his mother’s will. The cottage has been claimed by a woman from Milan, who announces it was left to her grandparents by the patriarch of the Serafino family, for assistance rendered in World War II. As you can imagine, this is not well received by the family, who believed their husband and father abandoned them during the war, knowing nothing of his fate.
As he investigates this woman’s claims, Hugh uncovers a devastating secret of his mother’s from World War II, one never spoken of, and which clearly shaped her life and that of her extended family, and indeed, everyone connected to Valetto.
This is a darker story than I expected, one where the horrors of war reverberate through the generations and impact those long after the event. But it is very well done; a story of love and loss, connection to the land and how history is with us always, regardless of modernisation, and new ways of considering the world. It’s also a story of friendship, secrets, of love, new and old, and the power of celebration. Very well done.
Reviewed by Lesley West
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dominic grew up in Sydney, Australia and now lives in Seattle, Washington. He is the author of six novels, including The Last Painting of Sara de Vos, which was a New York Times bestseller and a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. Sold into more than a dozen countries, the novel was chosen as a best book of 2016 by Amazon, Slate and the San Francisco Chronicle. In Australia, the novel won the Fiction Indie Book of the Year Award from the Independent Booksellers Association and was named the Literary Fiction Book of the Year as part of the Australian Book Industry Awards.
Dominic’s sixth novel, Return to Valetto, comes out in 2023. His other novels are: The Electric Hotel, The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre, The Beautiful Miscellaneous, and Bright and Distant Shores.
His essays, reviews, and short fiction have appeared in numerous publications, including The Atlantic, Texas Monthly, the Chicago Tribune, The New York Times, and The Australian. He is a recipient of the Dobie Paisano Fellowship from the Texas Institute of Letters, the Sherwood Anderson Fiction Prize, the Gulf Coast Fiction Prize, a new works grant from the Australia Council for the Arts, and a Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Dominic has served on the fiction faculty in the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers since 2008 and has also taught at the University of Texas at Austin, Southern Methodist University, and Rice University.
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