RETURN TO VALETTO

A grieving widower uncovers some long-buried family secrets in his mother’s native village in Italy.

Six years after historian Hugh Fisher’s wife died from cancer, her shoes are still in his closet, and his daughter, Susan, asks him bluntly if he ever plans to be happy again. After his well-regarded book about vanishing Italian towns garners Hugh several invitations to speak at Italian universities, Susan deplores his decision to spend six months there as yet another example of his wallowing in the past. But his plan to base himself in Valetto, the tiny village where his aging aunts still live, is upended when he learns that the cottage he inherited from his mother—her death is another recent trauma—is being occupied by someone his outraged Aunt Iris calls “a squatter.” Milanese chef Elisa Tomassi claims that her family was promised the cottage as recompense for assisting Hugh’s grandfather, who left his wife and daughters to join the anti-Fascist resistance during World War II and never returned. Veteran novelist Smith deftly weaves multiple themes of abandonment and loss throughout a compelling narrative studded with gorgeous descriptions of the Italian landscape and sharp character sketches; each of Hugh’s three aunts comes to life with ornery individualism, as do their indefatigably cheerful caretaker, Milo; his long-suffering wife, Donata; and other secondary characters. Hugh and Elisa are drawn to each other even as their separate agendas and individual psychic wounds threaten to keep them apart. A late-novel revelation about long-ago wrongdoing brings an overdue reckoning for a local fascist and enables Hugh to make peace with the mother he never felt he really knew. Nonetheless, Hugh acknowledges, “History does not offer us closure. It offers us the inscrutability of the present.” As this absorbing novel closes, Smith’s engaging protagonist seems ready to embrace this inscrutability and move on with his life.

More fine work from a gifted storyteller: engrossing, well written, and affecting.