The Moon and the Bonfires. The Beautiful Summer

The book presents two works by the remarkable Italian neorealist writer, poet, and translator Cesare Pavese: «The Moon and the Bonfires» and «The Beautiful Summer».

The novel «The Beautiful Summer» won the main Italian literary prize «Strega». Italy in the 1930s, a working-class suburb of Turin. Against this backdrop unfolds a vivid and dramatic love story between sixteen-year-old Gini and the artist Guido. Gini strives to break free from the dull reality and lives in anticipation of a beautiful summer.

The hero of the work «The Moon and the Bonfires», an Italian who made a career in America, is drawn to the past because only there, in his homeland, will his life find meaning — with old friends among sun-drenched vineyards, walnut groves, and hills. But upon returning, the hero realizes that everything has changed — both the places and the people, and only the smoke of bonfires, smoldering and never extinguished, sometimes flaring up again, remains the same — from the past...