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'A devastating marvel of a novel'
Sunday Telegraph
'A highly enjoyable novel... Giordano is especially good on the textures, smells, heat and colours of the Italian south. 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'
TLS
'If you're pining for an Italian break, then this might be the remedy: Heaven And Earth is rooted so deep in idyllic Puglia that you can almost feel the red soil under your sandals'
Daily Mail
'Raw and evocative: a breathtaking and poignant creation that will leave you itching under the skin'
Herald
'A stunning achievement'
André Aciman, author of Call Me By Your Name
'Perfect, moving, honest, brilliant, with characters who feel like old friends'
Andrew Sean Greer, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Less
'The perfect novel. Paolo 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, centuries-old olive groves and taciturn, proud people. 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.
Because 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.
PRAISE FOR PAOLO GIORDANO
'Mesmerizing... Giordano works with piercing subtlety' New York Times
'Elegant and fiercely intelligent' Elle
'Elegiac, tender and mournful' Wall Street Journal
About the author
PAOLO GIORDANO is a physicist and a bestselling writer. His first novel, THE SOLITUDE OF PRIME NUMBERS, was translated into more than 40 languages worldwide and won the Premio Strega (the Italian Booker).
Paolo is the author of the forthcoming novel HEAVEN AND EARTH and of the pamphlet HOW CONTAGION WORKS, a rallying cry inspired by the recent CoV-19 epidemic. He is also the creator of the new HBO series WE ARE WHO WE ARE, co-written and directed by Luca Guadagnino.
He holds a master's degree and a PhD in theoretical physics.
Summary
An epic love story that spans twenty years and half the globe, from Puglia to a frozen cave in Iceland.
Report
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. Francesca Carrington SUNDAY TELEGRAPH
