The Better Craftsman

When a stranger called Søren arrives in Gordàn in Northern Italy, looking to escape from his past, he is drawn to Nelson, the mysterious and reticent craftsman loathed by friends and family alike, who harbours a passion for crossbows. Thinking he has found a way to regain his innocence, Søren becomes his apprentice, taking him on a journey into the bowels of the earth, where nothing is quite what it seems, where visceral art and industry compete, echoes of distant battles mix with the present, and where a flood of biblical proportions threatens to wreak its revenge on hard-nosed modernity.

The Better Craftsman is a short novel about love, forgetting and fear, secrets and misunderstandings, and of revenge taken slowly and silently.

"No matter how long he stayed, no matter how long he spent drinking in their world, poring over its minute details, he would be forever foreign. A language that had rolled down through the ages on the tongues of widows in deathblack smocks would never be his, never could be his. He was an onlooker. A spectator. That dark, inevitable condition, the eternal forèst."