The Homecoming Party

From [Booklist]: We long for homecomings, yet all too often reality betrays our hopes. So it is for Marco, whose life in southern Italy is measured in long waits for his father Tullio’s returns, and punctuated by the times they spend hunting together. As happy as those interludes are, Marco always dreads the morning Tullio will vanish again into his émigré worker’s life building roads in France and Germany. Part of a group of kids who wander the beautiful countryside, Marco is nine when he stumbles upon a secret about his sister, Elisa, a college student. It binds them together in complicit silence, causing a buzzing in his head when he thinks about it. The boy becomes “finally clear and light” when Tullio surprises his son, who’s been ill, by returning early for a holiday vacation and bringing to a head the family’s collusion about Elisa as the two sit among émigré workers by the Christmas bonfire “burning memories . . . . in a collective reckoning up.” Alternating voices tell this mesmerizing coming-of-age tale about hard economic choices by an award-winning Italian writer. --Whitney Scott