The Duke

Cimamonte is the last heir of a once-powerful aristocratic family, living alone in his ancestors' crumbling villa above the fictional village of Vallorgàna in the Italian Dolomites. His isolation is disturbed when a local man — brash, practical, unbothered by old hierarchies — begins felling trees on Cimamonte's land without permission, forcing a confrontation that becomes a meditation on who actually has claim to land, history, and belonging.

Melchiorre, in his debut novel, writes in dense, ornate prose that mirrors Cimamonte's own overeducated, faintly absurd interiority — a man more comfortable with his family archive than with the present. The conflict over the timber becomes the occasion for the novel's real subject: the slow, often unflattering unraveling of an aristocratic self-image that has outlived its usefulness.

Longlisted for the International Booker Prize, The Duke is a quiet, interior novel rather than a plot-driven one, closer to character study than conflict narrative.