Le otto montagne

Pietro is a city boy from Milan whose family spends its summers in Grana, a small village beneath Monte Rosa in the Aosta Valley. Bruno is the village's last child, a shepherd's son who will never leave the mountains. Over the summers of their boyhood, the two become close, bound together as much by Pietro's demanding, mountain-obsessed father as by the landscape itself.

As adults, their paths split sharply — Pietro drifts through cities and travels the world before returning to the mountains he once resented; Bruno stays, builds a life as a stonemason and herder, and roots himself ever deeper into the valley. The novel follows both men across decades, through the slow erosion and repair of their friendship, and through what the mountains come to mean to each of them: for one, a place you leave to understand; for the other, the only place there is.

Cognetti, an experienced mountaineer himself, writes the Aosta Valley with the specificity of someone who has actually lived there — the eight mountains of the title come from a Nepalese cosmology Pietro encounters on later travels, framing the whole novel's question of what lies at the center of a life.