The Moon and the Bonfires

'Insinuating, haunting and lyrically pervasive' The New York Times Book ReviewA new translation by Tim ParksTwenty years after making his fortune in America, Eel is drawn back to the closest thing he has to a home: the Piedmontese countryside where he grew up poor and illegitimate. Wandering the valleys and vineyards with his childhood friend Nuto, Eel remembers the farm where he worked, his employer's beautiful daughters, the rituals of rural life. Yet as he discovers more about what happened there during the war, he realizes that these timeless landscapes hide terrible, savage secrets. By turns fond and evocative, seductive and troubling, The Moon and the Bonfires is a lyrical masterpiece of memory and betrayal.Translated with an Introduction by Tim Parks

Pavese is one of the few essential novelists of the mid-twentieth century, Pavese's nine short novels make up the most dense, dramatic, and homogeneous narrative cycle of modern Italy ... But above all they are works of an extraordinary depth where one never stops finding new levels, new meanings, Cesare Pavese's cool, contemplative voice was the most important among postwar Italian writers, Insinuating, haunting and lyrically pervasive, The Moon and the Bonfires [is Pavese's] masterpiece on the aftermath of the partisan war in the hills around Turin

Cesare Pavese was born in 1908 in Santo Stefano Belbo, a village in the hills of Piedmont. He worked as a translator (of Melville, Joyce and Faulkner) and as an editor for the publishing house Einaudi Editore, while also publishing his own poetry and a string of successful novels, including The House on the Hill and The Moon and the Bonfires. Never actively anti-Fascist himself, he was nevertheless sent into internal exile in Calabria in 1935 for having aided other subversives. He killed himself in 1950, shortly after receiving Italy's most prestigious literary prize, the Strega.