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FICTION

Milan, 1944. It’s dawn. At last the sky is silent and unencumbered but the bombing has reduced the city to a heap of rubble. Gemma must go. She has to protect her son, Alberto. Uncle Giacinto lives in the country. There, she and Alberto will be safe, far from the Germans, far from the war.

Milan, today. Miranda looks up at the sky, as if the sad, grey dome might give her the answer she’s been looking for. Why has her father disappeared? Why didn’t he even leave a note? What if something’s happened to him? Perhaps her father’s disappearance is just the last step in a detachment that happened a long time previously and has grown over the years amidst silence and misunderstandings – yet Miranda can’t let it go just like that. And so, she sets out to follow the faint trail and arrives at Sant’Egidio dei Gelsi, where her father and grandmother had gone to live in 1944. And there, under the peaceful sky of the Piedmontese countryside, she will gather together the fragments of a story that has only apparently been forgotten; the story of a fatherless little boy, obliged to grow up too quickly, and of a woman forced to make a terrible decision marking her family’s fate. A story that will finally lead her to her father but, above all, will allow her to understand how the future – the sky after us – will never be appeased unless we have the courage to clear away the clouds of the past and open up to love.

Silvia Zucca, A Graduate in English literature with a thesis on Shakespearean theatre and a passion for storytelling in all its various forms, Silvia Zucca combines writing with studies of cinema and filmmaking. She is also a literary translator (she translated Fifty Shades Darker, by E.L. James, and the first two chapters of the trilogy Crossfire by Sylvia Day). She lives and works in Milan and as well as writing she loves folk dancing, cats, wine, movies and good books. This is her second novel.