Heaven and Earth

By: Paolo Giordano, Anne Milano Appel - translator

Narrated by: Jane McDowell

Every summer Teresa follows her father to his childhood home in Puglia, down in the heel of Italy, a land of relentless, shimmering heat and centuries-old olive groves. There Teresa spends long afternoons enveloped in a sun-struck stupor, reading her grandmother's cheap crime paperbacks.

Everything changes the summer she meets the three boys who live on the masseria next door: Nicola, Tommaso and Bern - the man Teresa will love for the rest of her life. Raised like brothers on a farm that feels to Teresa almost suspended in time, the three boys share a complex, intimate and seemingly unassailable bond.

But no bond is unbreakable and no summer is truly endless, as Teresa soon discovers.

There is resentment underneath the surface of that strange brotherhood, a twisted kind of love that protects a dark secret. And when Bern - the enigmatic, restless gravitational centre of the group - commits a brutal act of revenge, not even a final pilgrimage to the edge of the world will be enough to bring back those perfect, golden hours in the shadow of the olive trees.

From the creator and writer of the new HBO series We Are Who We Are, co-written and directed by Luca Guadagnino (Call Me by Your Name) and starring Chloë Sevigny.

Translated by Anne Milano Appel.

©2020 Paolo Giordano (P)2020 Orion Publishing Group

Critic reviews

"Heaven and Earth is the perfect novel. Paolo Giordano is one of the handful of great writers working anywhere today." (Edmund White)

"A devastating marvel of a novel." (Sunday Telegraph)

"A fluid, expansive writer." (New York Times)