Gabriel is 30 years old, loves plants and works for a pest control company despite being an architect, lives alone, surrounded by pots, with small rituals and a few dating apps.
He has not spoken to his mother in 10 years, since he came out of the Witnesses, a religious sect that, after his father died when Gabriel was a child, had become their whole life.
One day when Gabriel is at the cemetery for the anniversary of his father’s death he finds waiting for him his aunt, his mother’s sister, the person who passed on his love of plants, with whom he severed relations at the time of his dissociation from the cult.
Her visit and the subsequent, painful confrontation make him aware of some changes in his mother’s life, which due to the long detachment Gabriel ignored and which will lead him to reconsider, perhaps, his own steps.
What is left of an individual when all his certainties are erased? How do we rebuild our roots when our plant can no longer draw on the soil that nourishes it? What happens when our affections reject us, and what remains after the collapse of the most cherished references one has had all one’s life? With a poetic and “painterly” style, Only Saints Don’t Think tells the story of the life of a cuttings of a human being, of a young man searching for a way to be a son without giving up being himself.
A poignant, nostalgic and emotional literary debut, the undiscounted account of an attempt to be still.
(Source: fandangolibri.co.uk)
Born in Milan in 1996, he is an elementary school teacher and basketball coach
