Return to Valetto

Readers may remember Dominic Smith’s 2016 novel, The Last Painting of Sara de Vos. In that novel, the sins of youth come back to haunt the present. It was a beautifully constructed novel of many layers and was embraced by many readers. Those readers, and any newcomers, won’t be disappointed with this new book.

A middle-aged academic, Hugh Fisher, an expert on abandoned towns in Italy, returns to his mother’s family village in Italy. It’s where he spent summers as a child, surrounded by his three aunts and grandmother; it’s a village that is now almost abandoned. Hugh is still grieving the passing of his wife more than five years ago. He’s come to the village to work on some papers, and to spend time with his aunts and grandmother, who’s shortly to turn 100 and planning a big celebration. He plans to stay in the cottage that he and his mother used and that is still full of memories of her.

When he arrives, he discovers that the cottage is occupied by a woman from the north, Elissa. She says her family looked after Hugh’s grandfather, Aldo, during the war when he went north to help the partisans; she claims that on his deathbed, Aldo bequeathed the cottage to her family in gratitude.

The war was a time of great division and its legacy has never been quite resolved, with many things left unspoken. Elissa’s arrival prompts the exposure of those wounds and reveals a secret that haunted both Hugh’s and Elissa’s mothers. Smith’s evocation of a fading and fractured Italy, of a man struggling with his grief yet with a possibility of hope, results in a novel that succeeds on so many levels. It’s a major achievement.