Return to Valetto

In Umbria, Italy, there sits a hilltop village where time, earthquakes and landslides have left the buildings damaged, and large parts of it simply sheared away. It is all but abandoned but for 10 diehard residents. This includes the widows Serafino – three eccentric sisters and their mother – who live together in their medieval villa. They are preparing to celebrate the 100th birthday of the matriarch when their nephew and grandson, Hugh, a professor and historian of abandoned places, returns for a sabbatical. Hugh is lost in grieving for his wife and mother and is surprised to find that a cottage in the village has been left to him in his mother’s will. The cottage has been claimed by a woman from Milan, who announces it was left to her grandparents by the patriarch of the Serafino family, for assistance rendered in World War II. As you can imagine, this is not well received by the family, who believed their husband and father abandoned them during the war, knowing nothing of his fate. As he investigates this woman’s claims, Hugh uncovers a devastating secret of his mother’s from World War II, one never spoken of, and which clearly shaped her life and that of her extended family, and indeed, everyone connected to Valetto. This is a darker story than I expected, one where the horrors of war reverberate through the generations and impact those long after the event. But it is very well done; a story of love and loss, connection to the land and how history is with us always, regardless of modernisation, and new ways of considering the world. It’s also a story of friendship, secrets, of love, new and old, and the power of celebration. Very well done. Reviewed by Lesley West   READ OTHER ARTICLES Reels of Life - The Electric Hotel ABOUT THE AUTHOR Dominic grew up in Sydney, Australia and now lives in Seattle, Washington. He is the author of six novels, including The Last Painting of Sara de Vos, which was a New York Times bestseller and a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice. Sold into more than a dozen countries, the novel was chosen as a best book of 2016 by Amazon, Slate and the San Francisco Chronicle. In Australia, the novel won the Fiction Indie Book of the Year Award from the Independent Booksellers Association and was named the Literary Fiction Book of the Year as part of the Australian Book Industry Awards. Dominic’s sixth novel, Return to Valetto, comes out in 2023. His other novels are: The Electric Hotel, The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre, The Beautiful Miscellaneous, and Bright and Distant Shores. His essays, reviews, and short fiction have appeared in numerous publications, including The Atlantic, Texas Monthly, the Chicago Tribune, The New York Times, and The Australian. He is a recipient of the Dobie Paisano Fellowship from the Texas Institute of Letters, the Sherwood Anderson Fiction Prize, the Gulf Coast Fiction Prize, a new works grant from the Australia Council for the Arts, and a Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Dominic has served on the fiction faculty in the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers since 2008 and has also taught at the University of Texas at Austin, Southern Methodist University, and Rice University. Visit Dominic Smith's website

Over the course of his career, Dominic Smith has demonstrated that his favorite playground as a writer is the past. With his sixth novel, Return to Valetto, Smith doesn’t break from his successful formula but instead perfects what he did so well with his award-winning 2016 book, The Last Painting of Sara de Vos, delivering a charming and captivating multigenerational family drama that beautifully blends the past with the present.  Smith whisks readers away to Valetto, Italy: a fictional, crumbling town that floats like an island in the clouds among the rolling hills of the Umbrian countryside. Although the setting sounds like something out of a fairy tale, Valetto has been in steady decline, with earthquakes and other natural disasters having driven away most of its inhabitants.  Hugh Fisher spent most of his childhood summers in Valetto, but when he returns decades later (now a historian and a grieving widower) to visit his aunts and celebrate his grandmother’s 100th birthday, the town has but 10 permanent residents—plus one unexpected new addition. The stone cottage that Hugh’s late mother bequeathed him has been claimed by an inscrutable woman named Elisa Tomassi, who insists that Hugh’s grandfather promised her family the cottage as a show of gratitude for sheltering him while he fought in World War II. As Hugh attempts to validate Elisa’s claims, his forays into the past uncover a terrible secret involving both his and Elisa’s mothers. It’s a bombshell that, once detonated, reverberates across generations and will have consequences that are felt far beyond the walls of Valetto. With Return to Valetto, Smith doesn’t reinvent the wheel, but he doesn’t need to: He is a master of his trade who has executed a flawless novel that satisfies on all counts. The writing is both accessible and evocative, the pace leisurely yet suspenseful, the characters and plot are intriguing, and the themes of grief, generational trauma and resilience are well considered. Smith has the authorial confidence to resist the urge to overcomplicate his novel, delivering a straightforward narrative with a nostalgic tone and classic style that cleverly match the subject material and setting. The result is a richly rewarding book that is imbued with a sense of timelessness. It’s an outright pleasure to read, an excellent choice for both armchair travelers looking to vicariously experience Italy’s dolce vita, and for lovers of impeccably crafted literary fiction.

Edoardo Ballerini’s magnetic performance draws out the beauty and darkness of places and people in Return to Valetto (9 hours), Dominic Smith’s elegant multigenerational family saga set in the splendor of the Italian countryside. After a two-year absence from Europe, where he studied Italy’s vanishing villages and towns, writer and historian Hugh Fisher returns to Valetto, Italy, for six months. This time, he’s focusing on family matters: namely visiting his aunts and 99-year-old grandmother and tending to the cottage left to him by his late mother, who died a year earlier. With an impeccable Italian accent, Ballerini portrays the tense dynamics as family members bicker over the cottage. After a squatter claims Fisher’s grandfather left it to her family in exchange for sheltering him during World War II, Ballerini’s adroit narration conveys subtle changes in the family that occur as the ensuing investigations unearth troubling secrets involving Hugh’s mother. The smooth effortlessness of Ballerini’s narration immerses readers in this tumultuous family history set against the backdrop of Valetto’s changing landscape. Read our starred review of the print edition of Return to Valetto.