Davide
Piras

Modesto Emanuele Minnai was born in a cursed village, where few children are born and few fathers die. Together with his parents, he earns a living selling walnuts and dried chestnuts. His teenage life is barely brightened by a mother more beautiful than wild broom, who counts her smiles. Everything changes the day his eyes meet Andrea’s, blue mirrors capable of holding the sea. Their fathers shared the hunger and mud of the Great War, forging a bond stronger than blood. But something different arises between Modesto and Andrea: a complicity made up of small gestures, running through the fields, silences that say more than words. They seek each other without calling each other, they recognise each other among others, they learn to be together as one learns a secret. The years that follow are terrible. Fascist control reaches the countryside and mountains of the island and has no mercy for those who feel different from others, nor will the judgement of their peers, agitated by a stormy era, be lenient. But Modesto and Andrea will be able to draw on that first glance, even in the darkest moments. Davide Piras continues the great tradition of Sardinian fiction, from Marcello Fois to Sergio Atzeni, revealing a rare talent for describing scenes of love and violence with the delicacy that is characteristic of great writers. Femmenella is a moving novel, a hymn to life that reads like a bitter and beautiful poem.