‘Veronesi truly knows and loves all matters of the heart’ – IAN MCEWAN
Black September tells the story of the blossoming of a twelve-year-old boy, Gigio Bellandi, during a summer in Versilia, Tuscany, in 1972: his discovery of music, reading, restlessness, desire, love – and then the unthinkable, lightning-fast interruption of it all. It reconstructs with vivid precision the images, smells, colours, and sounds that animated that lost season, and the irreversible event that overturns it.
But this is also a novel about the evocative power of words and the seductive power of language, as it tells the story of an explosion of a pure and surprising talent, also destined to last forever: that of literature and translation.
Black September tells the story of the blossoming of a twelve-year-old boy, Gigio Bellandi, during a summer in Versilia, Tuscany, in 1972: his discovery of music, reading, restlessness, desire, love – and then the unthinkable, lightning-fast interruption of it all. It reconstructs with vivid precision the images, smells, colours, and sounds that animated that lost season, and the irreversible event that overturns it.
But this is also a novel about the evocative power of words and the seductive power of language, as it tells the story of an explosion of a pure and surprising talent, also destined to last forever: that of literature and translation.
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Reviews
PRAISE FOR VERONESI'S THE HUMMINGBIRD
'Magnificent... Everything that makes the novel worthwhile and engaging is here' - Guardian
'Inventive, bold, unexpected' - Sunday Times
'Not since William Boyd's Any Human Heart has a novel captured the feast and famine nature of a single life with such invention and tenderness' - Financial Times
'Masterly: a cabinet of curiosities and delights, packed with small wonders' - Ian McEwan
'Ardent, gripping, and inventive to the core' - Jhumpa Lahiri