Impossible

In this taut novella set in the Dolomites, a cat-and-mouse interview opens between a young magistrate and an older suspect. It becomes an examination of perception versus truth and of the group protection afforded in a moment of collective action versus the echoing responsibility of the individual over 'the leprosy of time'.

In this novella set in the Dolomites, a cat-and-mouse interview opens between a young magistrate and an older suspect. It becomes an examination of perception versus truth and of the group protection afforded in a moment of collective action versus the echoing responsibility of the individual over 'the leprosy of time'.

***Longlisted for the CWA Crime in Translation Dagger 2023***

"If there's an entry point into the work of the enduring, award-winning Italian writer Erri De Luca, then N.S. Thompson's excellent translation is surely it ... Thoughtful and wise about life and landscape, it's the most cerebral of whodunnits" Ben East, Observer

Two men go walking in the Dolomites, but not together; one falls to his death, the other reports the body. Is it coincidence that they knew each other in earlier years, and that one had betrayed the other?

Impossible is at once a game of cat-and-mouse in which the prisoner, a survivor of a left-wing cadre now long dispersed, holds his own. Nor is he crushed by his solitary confinement from which he communicates with his distant beloved. This novel is a brilliant hymn to the lure of the mountains, an engrossing illumination of political brotherhood, and also the subtlest of detective stories.