Prima dell'Alba

Andrea grows up in a small village halfway up a mountain, where time stands still and everything revolves around his mother Dialma’s bar. Andrea has a disturbing, wild beauty about him, and is inhabited by “She”, a creature with whom he feels at one when he dances in the woods. While the world prepares him for a future that has the bars of a cage, Andrea lets himself be guided by his fantasies, by music and by the crystal-clear, perfect and prophetic voice of his idol, Kate Bush. Amedeo is an aspiring painter slightly older than Andrea, who also lives by constantly crossing the thin membrane that separates reality from dreams. Different in origin and social background, incapable of looking after himself, it is he who, thanks to a love so great as to be frightening, will give Andrea the chance to build his own destiny. However, certain gifts come at a price, and what Andrea will have to pay is the awareness that precious things can vanish at any moment. The protagonist of this novel spends the 1980s watching MTV, inspired by the stars of contemporary dance, at a time when AIDS casts a shadow over the search for identity. Alongside him and Amedeo, there are other unforgettable characters: Stefania, his strong and down-to-earth farmer friend; Davide, a dance and life teacher; and Dialma, a mother whose love threatens to petrify her son’s body. With intense and precise writing, Giancarlo Pastore recounts the journey of a teenager searching for himself in a small village in northern Italy, through a coming-of-age story centred on love, dance, music and Andrea himself, one of the most powerful protagonists in contemporary literature.