What Hell Is Not

(Hardback, Hardback)

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A heart-rending story of deprivation and resilience in mafia-run Palermo Take away love and you will have hell, you used to say to me, Don Pino. Give love and you will have what hell is not. Federico is a privileged teenager from Palermo. He is preparing to spend a summer learning English in Oxford when his teacher, Father Pino, asks him to help out at a youth centre in an area of Palermo dominated by mafia and misery. To his parents dismay, Federico decides to follow Father Pino into the darkness of Palermos alleyways. Far removed from his familiar surroundings, Federico begins to learn from the incredibly tough lives of the children who attend the youth centre, and also from Lucia, a beautiful girl full of courage and light. Then one day, Father Pino is murdered by the mafia, and the hope for Palermo and its beauty are entrusted to Federicos young hands. Alessandro DAvenia, himself a student of Father Pino Puglisi at this high school, draws a powerful, unforgettable portrait of an extraordinary and contradictory city, of a society suffocated by silence yet capable of incomparable acts of courage.

Reviews

A beautifully written novel, translated from the Italian, with a heartwarming story... The language soars like a symphony. The notes are in perfect pitch.

* New York Journal of Books *

If, like me, you are a fan of Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Quartet, I urge you to check out What Hell is Not.

* Literary Hub *

A mature work that looks the theme of evil and violence in the eye.

* Libero *

Rich in figurative language... [the story is] equally rich in characterization and setting.

* Booklist *

D'Avenia convincingly conveys the extent of the deprivation and of the reach of the Mafia's influence and control... [He] has a lyrical touch amid the violence and the squalor.

* Herald Scotland *

The dark story of Father Pinos passion and death is a long shriek of grief, but it is not in vain: it is also a hymn to love that becomes beauty.

* Antonia Arslan, author of Skylark Farm *

What Hell Is Not celebrates resilience in the face of deprivation and the transformative power of small acts of love.

* Fra Noi, Chicago *

Each short chapter of this book is a work of poetic beauty, some showing the transformative power of love and some showing the devastation that hate brings into the world.

* Marjorie's World of Books, blog review *

Author Bio

Alessandro DAveniateaches Ancient Greek, Latin and Literature at a high school in Milan. His debut novel,White as Milk, Red as Blood,was translated into twenty-one languages and turned into a film. Together with his second novel, it spent three years on the Italian fiction top ten bestseller list, selling more than one million copies in Italy alone.What Hell Is Not is his third novel. Jeremy Parzen studied Italian at UCLA. He is a translator, blogger, musician and wine writer. He lives in Houston, Texas.