This month’s Skylarking Book Club pick is the wonderful new novel from Juliet Grames, The Lost Boy of Santa Chionia. This is one of Alex’s books of the year. Here’s what he wrote about it: “A young American, bursting with hope and idealism, goes to an impossibly remote village in Calabria where she finds no electricity or running water, but plenty of secrets. When a buried skeleton is discovered after a heavy flood, she is drawn into a quest to uncover the mysteries of her new home. We all know where the road paved with good intentions leads, but Juliet Grames expertly takes the reader through a series of satisfying twists and turns on the journey. Exquisitely written and beguilingly evocative, this is a jewel of a novel which will entertain, fascinate, and move you. Highly, highly recommended!”
We’ll be meeting in the shop, as usual, on the last Thursday of the month at 6:30 p.m. Can’t wait to see you there!
One unidentified skeleton. Three missing men. A village full of secrets. The best-selling author of The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna brings us a sparkling—by turns funny and moving—novel about a young American woman turned amateur detective in a small village in Southern Italy (“Terrific” –Boston Globe).
Calabria, 1960. Francesca Loftfield, a twenty-seven-year-old, starry-eyed American, arrives in the isolated mountain village of Santa Chionia tasked with opening a nursery school. There is no road, no doctor, no running water or electricity. And thanks to a recent flood that swept away the post office, there’s no mail, either.
Most troubling, though, is the human skeleton that surfaced after the flood waters receded. Who is it? And why don’t the police come and investigate? When the local priest's housekeeper begs Francesca to help determine if the remains are those of her long-missing son, Francesca begins to ask a lot of inconvenient questions. As an outsider, she might be the only person who can uncover the truth. Or she might be getting in over her head. As she attempts to juggle a nosy landlady, a suspiciously dashing shepherd, and a network of local families bound together by a code of silence, Francesca finds herself forced to choose between the charitable mission that brought her to Santa Chionia, and her future happiness, between truth and survival.
Set in the wild heart of Calabria, a land of sheer cliff faces, ancient tradition, dazzling sunlight—and one of the world’s most ruthless criminal syndicates—The Lost Boy of Santa Chionia is a suspenseful puzzle mystery, a captivating romance, and an affecting portrait of a young woman in search of a meaningful life.
