About the book
In the bend of a winding road between forests and olive orchards in northern Italy, there is a house that Alma’s parents bought as a ruin. She was less than a year old when they first took her with them and, since then, not a summer passed without visiting the house, where everything seems to happen more intensely than in the Netherlands. Alma’s father fell ill there and passed away the following year, a month before they were to go to Italy. In the summers thereafter the loss grew steadily heavier. The house that was so entwined with him, now symbolized his absence, while at the same time giving her the ability to summon him in hallucinatory images. In the house Alma learned to hide her grief between the cracks and discovered how to let herself fall from the highest bridge in the valley. Now that, for the first time ever, she cannot return this summer, she only has language to win back the house.
