What I'm Reading: Return to Valetto
By Dominic Smith
What I’m Reading is a monthly feature of So Much Stuff, offering brief excerpts from contemporary novels and story collections you’ll want to add to your TBR pile.
Dominic Smith was my first supervisor in grad school and has remained a generous supporter of my work, and it gives me great pleasure to recommend his latest novel, Return to Valetto, which was just awarded the 2024 Jesse H. Jones Award for Best Book of Fiction.
It’s a complex and moving story of grief and renewal, set against the backdrop of a fictional, nearly abandoned Umbrian town, where determining rightful ownership of a family cottage uncovers dark secrets buried during World War II.
To some extent, I became a historian within those mildew-blotched walls, on those secret afternoons when I inventoried what remained of those who had fled. In the restaurant, I studied the tattered menus, imagined what people had been eating when the tremor shook the town, who had ordered the donzelline aromatiche, the little damsels with herbs, right as the windows began to rattle, and I went into the kitchen to count plates, saucepans, and silverware, because a precise tally of the past seemed important. I never quite understood why no one had cleaned up the ruins or rescued what was still intact, but I’ve since seen the same thing in dozens of abandoned places—a barrage of objects people left behind, a monument to the day and the hour when everything changed.
Return to Valetto is available HERE from Bookshop.org. Happy reading!
Sounds wonderful - Umbria!