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Heaven and Earth
- Author Paolo Giordano
- Narrator Jane McDowell
- Publisher Orion
- Run Time 14 hours and 46 minutes
- Format Audio
- Genre Family life fiction, Fiction: general and literary, Narrative theme: Coming of age, Narrative theme: Social issues.
Titles Purchased
- 1-5
- 6-10
- 11-15
- 16-20
- Over 20
Price p/Title
- €9.95
- €8.95
- €7.95
- €6.95
- €5.95
Listen to a sample
What to expect
'A fluid, expansive writer' New York Times
'You can almost feel the red soil of Puglia under your sandals' Daily Mail
'Raw and evocative: a breathtaking and poignant creation' Herald
'A stunning achievement' André Aciman
'Perfect, with characters who feel like old friends' Andrew Sean Greer
'Giordano is one of the handful of great writers working anywhere today' Edmund White
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 truly endless, as Teresa soon discovers.
Critics Review
-
Big in theme, languid in pace and exquisite in execution… The plot is deftly handled, moving from a secretive steamy teenage romance in Speziale to a cave in Iceland – taking in fringe eco-activism and a doomed attempt to conceive a child along the way…The dreamy lyricism of the prose (“the foam-slick rocks, the silent sea, and, all around, the mercilessly bright night of the South”)… Giordano’s novel is a devastating marvel.
SUNDAY TELEGRAPH -
A highly enjoyable novel, convincingly and smoothly translated by Anne Milano Appel. Spanning twenty years and the anguished love affair between Teresa and Bern, some of it takes place in the dark recent days when Puglia’s olive trees were attacked by a beetle that reduced the landscape to an apocalyptic vision of the planet’s end. Giordano is especially good on the textures, smells, heat and colours of the Italian south, where almost the whole novel is set, the herbs that scent the air, the rocky terrain on which little grows. These stay long in the mind, as does the way he writes about the obsessiveness of love, the way it dominates and distorts and the self-delusions and fantasies it gives rise to. Puglia’s scorched earth and, later in the novel, the craters and caverns of Iceland become metaphors for a plot that is both touching and sad, violent and uncomfortable.
TLS -
Heaven And Earth is rooted so deep in idyllic Puglia that you can almost feel the red soil under your sandals
DAILY MAIL -
Giordano is a fluid, expansive writer. The chapters flow effortlessly back and forth in time, pulling us deeper into the story of Teresa and Bern’s great love. The landscape shimmers with their longing. “It all belonged to us,” Bern says. “The trees and the stone walls. The heavens. Even the heavens belonged to us, Teresa.”
NEW YORK TIMES -
It’s been too long since Italian author Paolo Giordano (who happens to have a PhD in particle physics) wrote a novel… Heaven and Earth is set in Puglia and focuses on four friends trying to grow up. It’s a story that sprawls and stuns.
goop (Summer 2020 Reading List) -
Raw and evocative, Giordano’s Heaven and Earth is a breathtaking and poignant creation
SCOTLAND ON SUNDAY
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