At the tail end of the 1960s, the thirteen-year-old MichelÃÂn spends
his summers at his grandparents' modest estate in Nasca, near Lake Maggiore,
losing himself in the tales of horror, adventure, and mystery shelved in his
grandfather's library. The greatest mystery he's ever encountered, however,
doesn't come from a book--it's the groundskeeper, Felice, a sometimes
frightening, sometimes gentle, always colorful man of uncertain age who speaks
a bizarre dialect and whose memory gets worse with each passing day. When
MichelÃÂn volunteers to help the old man by providing him with clever mnemonic
devices to keep his memory alive, the boy soon finds himself obsessed with
piecing together the eerie hodgepodge of Felice's biography . . . a quest that
leads to the uncovering of skeletons in Nazi uniforms in the attic, to Felice's
admission that he can hear the voices of the dead, and to a new perspective on
Felice's endless war against the insatiable local slugs, who are by no means
merely a horticultural threat.
And yet nothing could be more fascinating to MichelÃÂn
than the Felice's own secret origins. Where did he come from? Is he the victim
or the villain of his story? Is he a noble hero, a holy fool, or perhaps the
very thing that MichelÃÂn most wants and fears: a real-life monster.
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