Cirrus@Austlit

'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.

'On a hot day in late June, a young girl kneels outside a convent, then falls on her face. When the nuns take her in, they name her Dolores.

'Dolores adjusts to the rhythm of her new life - to the nuns with wild hairs curling from their chins, the soup chewed as if it were meat, the bells that ring throughout the day.

'But in the dark, private theatre of her mind are memories - of love motels lit by neon red hearts, discos in abandoned hospitals and a boy called Angelo.

'And inside her, a baby is growing.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.