Canne al vento (Reeds in the Wind)

"This is by Grazia Deledda, a writer from Sardinia, born in 1871 and died in 1936. She was from a small bourgeois family and was not permitted to study but she wanted to learn so much that she hid in bed at night to read. She started to write early and she sent short stories to several newspapers who published her and she became very famous and won the Nobel prize in 1926. She always wrote about Sardinia and was very linked to her territory. Canne al Vento is about four sisters in the country who stay with their father and don’t marry, but one goes away, is sent away by the father because she is pregnant and is not married. And after 20 years a letter arrives from her son: the woman has died but he says he wants to come to the house of the family and he wants to know them. So this handsome young man comes to the house of these three women who are so excited to see him, the new nephew. They love him, and do their best to welcome him in the big dark house. But, after some time, they realise that he came to see them because he needs money and he takes all their property away. Yes, and it is beautifully written. My new book is called Train To Budapest and it’s set in 1956 in the Cold War. A young journalist from Florence is sent to write about how people live on the other side of the Iron Curtain. She takes the opportunity of this work trip to go and look and search for a childhood friend, a little boy, the son of a Jewish family who went back to Austria in 1939 and he wrote many letters to her but disappeared in 1942. She doesn’t know if he died in a concentration camp or if he survived. So she tries to find traces of this young man who would now be 28, and she goes around to visit the camps and looks for him and then, at the end… I won’t say what happens. It is a surprise."