Can You Hear Me?

Waterstones Thriller of the Month for June 2018

The perfect summer read, this is a grippingly taut coming-of-age thriller, set amidst the scorched landscape of an Italian heatwave.

In the August of 1978, the summer I met Anna Trabuio, my father took a girl into the woods...

I was sixteen.

He had been gone a long time already, but that was it - not even a year after he lost his job and that boy disappeared - that was when everything broke.

1978. Ponte, a small community in Northern Italy.

It is an unbearably hot summer, not unlike many others. For sixteen year-old Elia Furenti, living an unremarkable life of moderate unhappiness, the summer promises little. That is, until the day the beautiful, damaged Anna – the mother of his new friend Stefano - returns to Ponte and firmly propels Elia to the edge of adulthood.

Then everything starts to unravel.

First Elia's father, Ettore, is let go from his job and loses himself in the darkest corners of his mind. Then a young boy is brutally murdered and a girl climbs into a van and vanishes in the deep, dark woods...

Translated by English PEN Award-winning translator Alex Valente, Can You Hear Me? is a deliciously dark slice of Italian noir, the first of award-winning author Elena Varvello’s novels to be translated into English. Hailed by the Guardian as 'a novel of crime and darkness that eschews straightforward domestic noir', it combines the sophisticated characterisation of Elena Ferrante, with the psychological shockwaves of Leila Slimani’s Lullaby. A perfectly pitched summer thriller that introduces a major new voice in Italian fiction.

• Publisher: John Murray Press
• ISBN: 9781473654891
• Number of pages: 272
• Weight: 216g
• Dimensions: 199 x 156 x 18 mm