Verdigris

Summer after summer in the late 1960s, Michelino, aged thirteen, stays with his grandparents at their small country property in Nasca, close to Lake Maggiore. He reads horror, adventure and mystery from his grandfather's library. The strangest puzzle he meets there is not in any book.

It is Felice, the groundskeeper. Felice is a man of uncertain age with a colorful dialect, by turns frightening and gentle, and his memory fails a little more each day.

Michelino offers to help by inventing mnemonic devices to hold Felice's memories in place. Soon he is fixed on assembling the odd, unsettling pieces of the old man's life. The search turns up skeletons in Nazi uniforms in the attic. Felice also admits that he hears the voices of the dead.

Felice fights a constant war against the local slugs, and the book treats them as more than a garden pest. Reading it means following a boy's fascination as it slides from curiosity toward dread. Michelino wants to know where Felice came from, and whether he is a victim, a villain, a holy fool or the real-life monster the boy most wants and fears to find.