Heaven and Earth

February 1, 2020

Award-winning Métis author Dimaline makes her debut with an American publisher, Empire of Wild, the edgy story of Joan, heard fighting vituperatively with her now missing husband, who believes she spots him posing as a charismatic preacher in a battered revival tent (75,000-copy first printing). The youngest winner ever of Italy's prestigious Premio Strega, Giordano (The Solitude of Prime Numbers) returns with Heaven and Earth to limn the enduring bonds linking Teresa to three young men she meets one summer in Puglia, her father's childhood home. From debuter Mackenzie, a Commonwealth Short Story Prize winner, One Year of Ugly (60,000-copy first printing) takes a humorous approach to recount the travails of a Venezuelan family living illegally in Trinidad. A best-selling author in mass market, McKinlay moves into trade paperback original with Paris Is Always a Good Idea, the story.` of a young woman who revisits her gap year in Ireland, France, and Italy, looking for lost loves but finding something different. In the No. 1 New York Times best-selling Macomber's A Walk Along the Beach, shy Willa--especially close to sister Harper after their mother's death--is ready to follow Harper's advice about risking love until tragedy befalls Harper. Martin returns after his high-flying debut, Early Work, with the story collection Cool for America about the gap between what people want and what they achieve. Winner of the Terry Southern Prize, Nugent shows us all the stumbling antics of near-adults in Fraternity. In Poeppel's Musical Chairs, Bridget and Will hatch a plan to lure shining-star violinist Gavin Glantz back to their Forsyth Trio, which they founded together as Juilliard students, even as Bridget wrestles with multiple family complications (40,000-copy first printing).

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May 15, 2020
Summers in Puglia forge fraught bonds between a privileged girl from Turin and three local boys in a through-the-years saga jam-packed with events. Bern, Nicola, and Tommaso live on the farm adjacent to Teresa's grandmother's home, and Teresa is fascinated by the trio from the instant she spots them taking an illicit nighttime swim in her grandmother's pool when she's 14. By the time she's 17, she and Bern are lovers, which arouses Nicola's and particularly Tommaso's jealousy. Bern's devotion to Italo Calvino's novel The Baron in the Trees none-too-subtly flags him as given to extremes, and as the novel flashes forward to 2012, Tommaso's drunken revelations to 32-year-old Teresa reveal that the boys' bond was closer and weirder than she ever knew. Then we're whisked back to 2003, when Teresa inherits her grandmother's estate, which includes the farm where Bern, Tommaso, and some new friends--Nicola glaringly not among them--are now squatting. Still fixated on Bern, Teresa joins their commune devoted to sustainable living and guerrilla activism in defense of the environment. Incident piles on top of incident: The commune breaks up; Teresa and Bern have trouble conceiving a child and decide to get married to raise money for infertility treatments; those don't work, so she sets Bern free by pretending she's been unfaithful. What all this has to do with the insistently reiterated theme of Bern's yearning for absolutes is murky--until Tommaso's confession resumes, and readers learn what drove Bern to the act that results in his fleeing Italy. His final meeting with Teresa has touching moments, muffled by the extreme improbability of the circumstances. Grappling with material similar to Richard Powers' masterful The Overstory (2018), Giordano gets bogged down in plot and fails to persuasively convey his characters' ideological passions. Bern remains an enigma, as does Teresa's devotion to him. Some interesting ideas don't mesh well with a whole lot of melodrama.

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Starred review from May 18, 2020
Giordano’s extraordinary novel of fateful friendships and obsessive love (after The Solitude of Prime Numbers) revolves around an Italian woman’s memories of her summers in Puglia in the late 1990s. Teresa Gasparro is 14 and on one of her annual summer visits from Turin to her grandmother’s house in the small village of Speziale when she gets her first glimpse of the three boys who will change her life. Brothers Bern and Tommaso Coriano, and cousin Nicola Belpanno, live next door in a farmhouse and sneak in at night to swim naked in the villa’s pool. As Teresa gets to know the boys, she is invited to the farmhouse, which turns out to be home to a Christian sect that believes in reincarnation of all living things. Teresa is drawn instantly to Bern and constantly thinks about him and his world while back at school throughout the years, and during the summer she turns 17, they consummate their relationship. Before she leaves, she asks Bern to kiss her in front of the other boys, and the awkwardness reveals intense jealousy. Giordano then shifts to 2012, when Teresa reconnects with Tomasso, reflects on the disappearance of the other two from their lives, and learns the dark details of the boys’ past. Lush regional details, indelible characters, and a riveting story line make this an overwhelmingly emotional read. Giordano’s captivating tale is a magnificent testament to the lingering impact of a charged romance. Agent: Andrew Wylie, the Wylie Agency.

June 1, 2020
Bern, Nicola, and Tommaso live in a farmhouse, or masseria, near Teresa's grandmother's home in the Puglia region of southern Italy. Teresa visits every summer and quickly bonds with the three boys. In their teen years, Teresa and Bern fall in love over a long, intense summer. Back home that autumn, Teresa learns that Bern impregnated another woman. She loses contact with the brothers, but years later they reconnect when the brothers create a commune in the masseria with four passionate friends. The choices they make and secrets they keep as they grow into adulthood will reverberate throughout their lives. The novel is told in four sections that alternate between Teresa's perspective from the 1990s onward, and a late-night conversation she has with Tommaso in the early 2010s, reflecting back on Bern. With rich descriptions and engrossing, memorable writing, Italian novelist Giordano (Like Family, 2015) explores love, faith, and lifelong bonds. Readers who enjoyed Caite Dolan-Leach's We Went to the Woods (2019) will appreciate the similar quest to create a world worth believing in.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)