'Giulia is ten. She lives on the greenest island in a volcanic archipelago. She has never left. Her best friend, apart from her older sister Giovanna, is a donkey. Giulia and Giovanna's days on the island are shaped by ritual, community, superstition and isolation.
'Until the men arrive. And a foreign yacht anchors at the port. And the vines begin to fail. And everything changes.
'From the author of Dolores, Strangers at the Port is an exquisite, enchanted novel about myth and memory, suspicion and dislocation, emigrants and explorers.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
Author's note:
In the late nineteenth century, two unrelated events occurred on the Aeolian Islands of Sicily - Lipari was decreed a place of habitual detention and the phylloxera epidemic, which had been spreading through Europe, finally reached Salina, prompting economic collapse and mass migration. One visitor to the archipelago during this period was the Archduke Ludwig Salvator of Austria.
Epigraph:
My suffering is only noble when I put it into words.
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
