Heaven and Earth: A Novel
Paolo Giordano
Jul 2020 · Penguin Random House Audio · Narrated by Jane McDowell
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Audiobook
14 hr 27 min
Unabridged
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About this audiobook
A powerful, epic novel of four friends as they grapple with desire, youth, death, and faith in a sweeping story by the international bestselling author of The Solitude of Prime Numbers
“Perfect, moving, honest, brilliant, with characters who feel like old friends.”
—Andrew Sean Greer, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Less
“Heaven and Earth is a stunning achievement and confirms him as an electrifying presence in contemporary fiction.”
—André Aciman, author of Call Me by Your Name and Find Me
Every summer Teresa follows her father to his childhood home in Puglia, down in the heel of Italy, a land of relentless, shimmering heat, centuries-old olive groves and families who have lived there for generations. She spends long afternoons enveloped in a sunstruck stupor, reading her grandmother's paperbacks.
Everything changes the summer she meets the three boys who live on the farm next door: Nicola, Tommaso and Bern—the man Teresa will love for the rest of her life. Raised like brothers on a farm that feels to Teresa almost suspended in time, the three boys share a complex, intimate, and seemingly unassailable bond.
But no bond is unbreakable and no summer truly endless, as Teresa soon discovers.
Because there is resentment underneath the surface of that strange brotherhood, a twisted kind of love that protects a dark secret. And when Bern—the enigmatic, restless gravitational center of the group—commits a brutal act of revenge, not even a final pilgrimage to the edge of the world will be enough to bring back those perfect, golden hours in the shadow of the olive trees.
An unforgettable story of enduring love, the bonds between men, and the all-too-human search for meaning, Heaven and Earth is Paolo Giordano at his best: an author capable of unveiling the depths of the human soul, who has now given us the old-fashioned pleasure of a big, sprawling novel in which to lose ourselves.
About the author
Paolo Giordano is also the author of the critically acclaimed Like Family and The Human Body, and the international bestseller The Solitude of Prime Numbers, which has been translated into more than forty languages, as well as How Contagion Works, about the COVID-19 pandemic. Heaven and Earth is his latest novel. Giordano has a PhD in particle physics and is now a full-time writer. He lives in Italy.
Anne Milano Appel, PhD, has been awarded the Italian Prose in Translation Award (2015), the John Florio Prize for Italian translation (2013), and the Northern California Book Award for Translation, Fiction (2013, 2014). She has translated works by Claudio Magris, Paolo Giordano, Giovanni Arpino, and numerous others.
Anne Milano Appel, PhD, has been awarded the Italian Prose in Translation Award (2015), the John Florio Prize for Italian translation (2013), and the Northern California Book Award for Translation, Fiction (2013, 2014). She has translated works by Claudio Magris, Paolo Giordano, Giovanni Arpino, and numerous others.
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