Can you hear me? By Elena Varvello.
In the August of 1978, the summer I met Anna Trabuio, my father took a girl into the woods...
I was sixteen.
He had been gone a long time already, but that was it - not even a year after he lost his job and that boy disappeared - that was when everything broke.
1978.
Ponte, a small community in Northern Italy. An unbearably hot summer like many others. Elia Furenti is sixteen, living an unremarkable life of moderate unhappiness, until the day the beautiful, damaged Anna returns to Ponte and firmly propels Elia to the edge of adulthood.
But then everything starts to unravel.
Elia's father, Ettore, is let go from his job and loses himself in the darkest corners of his mind. A young boy is murdered. And a girl climbs into a van and vanishes in the deep, dark woods...
A good read with some good characters. Likeable story. Slow to start bit then I couldn't put it down. 4*.

I read to the end, but wasn't engrossed or felt much pleasure reading this. It is meant to be set in Italy, but for a while I thought it was set in the US, and then it just didn't seem to be anywhere really, there was no sense of Italy at all except for the Italian-sounding personal names. I thought that a great shame, and to put the tag-line 'set during a scorching Italian summer' gives the reader false expectations.
Likewise, the tag-line called it 'gripping'. It was not.
None of the characters were at all likeable, and I didn't like the way that dreadful behaviour seemed excused by mental illness. What a strange thing to imply. The main protagonist was a teenage boy who seemed only concerned with himself - yes, I know that this is what to expect with a teenager, but why write a book like this?

I experienced a mild sense of excitement that I would have to talk about this book for a whole month wearing my bookseller hat, so I started reading with a heightened sense of anticipation. Now I love a translated slow-burner as much as the next person, but for some reason or other this one just didn’t hit the spot. Unlike undoubtedly hundreds of others, I was unerringly frustrated by this obvious hybrid of autobiography and fiction, at odds with my usual enjoyment for the genre- for example Karl Ove Knausgard or Edward St Aubyn. I felt for the most part I was just an incidental passenger to the author’s cathartic writing exercise, which revealed itself quickly to be what I perceived to be an exploration of her own father’s mental disturbance. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with this, but I felt it was to the detriment of what could have been an infinitely more engaging experience for the reader.

Sometimes as a bookseller, I recommend books to people with the words, “Well, nothing really happens, but things don’t happen in a beautifully written way”, and this is what I was longing for in this book. There was a real feeling of deferred happenings in this book, and at times a notable compulsion by the author to pull back from events that could have given some substance and interest to the whole affair. Yes there’s a tangible thread of violence running through the book, and a not altogether convincing seduction, but the weirdly overemotional tone that reveals itself in the words and deeds of some characters, does begin to feel like some kind of therapy group literature, and a real lost the feel of dramatic tension to what cites itself as a thriller. As I said, I was looking forward to this one immensely, but feel I must go elsewhere for my Italian fiction fix, where nothing can happen, as long as it doesn’t not happen beautifully.

Can You Hear Me? was creepy and unsettling but never prurient despite tackling teenage sexual experience, mental illness, and murder. The characters didn't draw me in but the book was well done.

I found this to be a bad version of stories I’ve read many times before.

This book was originally published in Italy and the descriptions of the town, people and culture already set me on a exciting and thrilling road with this amazing read. Highly recommended.

This is a hauntingly tense short novel about a family in a small rural Italian community which has lost its local industry. The characters struggle with adolescence, loneliness and mental illness. This is not a crime mystery but instead is more of a psychological study. Special mention has to be made of the translation by Alex Valente of Elena Varvello's original work. The novel skips back and forth in time and captures complex motivations and emotions with a deceptive simplicity. Highly recommend.

With thanks to Two Roads Press, John Murray Publishers and Netgalley for a review copy.

Elia Furenti is sixteen and living in small Italian village with his mother and father, it is 1978. His father has lost his job and started to behave strangely, his mother pretends not to notice and a young boy disappears in the area. By the height of the summer life in the village is hot and tense, then Anna returns with her son. Elia becomes friends with the son but falls heavily for Anna, a woman over twice his age. Then a young girl disappears and Elia is sure he knows what has gone on.

This is a short and tense book. I didn't particularly get engrossed in the story which affected my enjoyment but I can see why many readers really love this tale. There is a sense of tension in the spare writing which adds to a sense of menace but ultimately it was not enough for me.

Northern Italy is brilliantly imagined in this dark insight into on young boy's awakening to the truth of his family's buried secrets. As he begins to discover more about himself, so too does his knowledge of his father's nefarious dark side grow.

Whilst a dark and twisted tale, I felt this introduced the ultimate intrigue of the tale far too soon and, instead of being a thrilling tale, became more of an insight into a mentally unwell individual from one closest to him. Not to say it was any less impactful because of this, it just wasn't what I had come to expect from the synopsis.

It has been described as a coming of age story and a thriller, but it is far more of the first, although it does have its suspenseful moments. It is also the story of the fissures tearing apart a family (or even two families) and a description of an individual mental breakdown and its effect on others. It is far more about the unspoken, about all the things that crack open a facade and leave people broken, even though they pretend to be resilient. It is about people hiding the truth even from themselves.

I sometimes feel I am missing something. Other people love a book, people whose opinions I respect and often share, but I just don’t get it. I feel a bit like this with Can You Hear Me? It is marketed as both suspense and coming-of-age. It is a coming-of-age story, but I am struggling to find any suspense.

The narrator, 16-year-old Elia, begins by telling you the climax of the story. His father is having some kind of mental crisis. Elia suspects he was involved in the disappearance of a boy and he will go on to take the teenage babysitter from next door into the woods.

Of course many great books employ this technique and yet still manage to pique your curiosity because you want to know how they get there, books as diverse as Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier or Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut. However here, I didn’t feel that there was any interest or anything to feel curious about, because there is no struggle or conflict, no sense that anyone is trying to influence events.

Elia drifts through the summer, doing coming-of-age stuff, hanging out with a kid his parents disapprove of, challenging him to dares, getting the hots for his mate’s mum, and meanwhile his father is disintegrating. Elia signals his unease by putting a picture of the missing boy on his wall and saying inarticulate teenage boy things to his mum along the lines of, what about that boy, though?

The characters speak in abstractions so you know that they’re deep, such as when Elia’s mother says to him, ‘I’ve thought about some things, you know? I don’t know why they felt so important. They don’t matter at all now. You have your life to live.’ And so it goes on to the inevitable.

There’s a sense of overwhelming passivity about it, there’s no suspense because the characters don’t do anything or even look remotely as if they might. It’s very moody and atmospheric but you feel like you want to puncture it, like ask them why no one thought to contact the police or a mental health professional. Elia’s mum works in a library, she could have looked it up.

If it weren’t for the fact that it came highly recommended, I wouldn’t have finished it.

A beautifully written simple easy read. This book was a joy to read. It is as if every word has been thought out. It is about the falling apart of one family and how fragile the mind can be. Elia learns so much about himself and life in one summer. Events happen that make him have to grow up fast. This is a gripping sometimes dark novel that is well worth reading.

Atmospheric and gripping from the start, I read this book in one afternoon but the story has stayed with me for weeks.

Elia Furenti lives with his parents in a remote house in the depth of the woods near to Ponte in Northern Italy. He is a sixteen-year-old schoolboy, a loner who has the woods as his play ground but he is also happy at home with his family and his comics. In the hot August days of 1978 he befriends a boy new to the town named Stefano Trabuio who lives with his troubled mother Anna, They hang around together trying to make sense of the world around them. He has a massive crush on Anna who encourages their friendship although they are a generation apart. It is indeed a summer of discovery for Elia.
That summer Elia’s father Ettore is made redundant. He is furious and cannot accept what has happened. He is bent on revenge, writing letters of protest at his fate. His mental health begins to deteriorate and he takes to spending long hours alone in his bolthole or away from his family, who are confused and worried by his absences. Then a local boy goes missing. Everyone in the town if frantic with worry but the searches yield no clues until a body is found. Anxiety and sadness sweep through the community. As fate would have it Ettore is out driving alone one night when he spots a local girl walking home along a long secluded forest road. He offers her a lift home and she climbs into his car. That girl never arrives back to her family that night and the town is on high alert, shaken and determined to discover whether they have a double murderer in their town.
As the story continues Elia’s quiet life begins to unravel. His father is in a very dark place and Anna, beautiful Anna is a welcome distraction. Elia’s mother is gravely concerned by Ettore’s increasingly strange behaviour, but is passive and not at all proactive. "Can you hear me?" is partly a coming of age novel and partly a crime mystery. It looks carefully at how the mind can deteriorate during stressful times and how relationships can either flourish or wither away. Other issues within this novel, translated from Italian, are loyalty, betrayal and grief. I liked the beautiful descriptions and the steady development of the story but found the lack of punctuation a heady distraction. It broke up the story making it difficult to follow at times. I also found the storyline very depressing with only few moments of lightness. The characters seemed remote although they were carefully developed with stories of their own to reveal. An atmosphere of menace pervaded the story as I read on towards the conclusion.
I would like to thank NetGalley and publisher Two Roads for my copy of this novel, sent out to me in return for an honest review. Although I felt compelled to read on to the very end of the novel, the book did not enthral me or excite me. It’s a 2.5* review from me.

Forget Italian clichés - there are no olive groves here, and if I say it almost has a Scandinavian feel, that's a compliment to its sense of brutality, desolation and encroaching menace. But this novel also has the tenderness of something raw. Powerful and extraordinary.

Excellent book with great characters. Very well written. I would recommend this book.

I could not get into this book. It needed proof reading at the beginning the first couple of pages.

A short, intense book about coming of age, fathers and sons, violence and heat. The fragmented style can feel distancing at times, possibly an effect of translation? Atmospheric and evocative, almost a kind of prose poem in the way it captures moments.