"Superbly paced, this potent novel unpacks difficult father-son dynamics and the cataclysmic consequences of jealousy."
An enthralling story of a young man’s descent into a dark mire of jealousy, Rupert Thomson’s Dark is the Morning sees lost soul Gino return to his family home in Italy’s Abruzzo region: “Caracciolo, where I had been born and raised. I would die there too, if I wasn’t careful”.
So far, so ominous, and then Gino’s father suggests it’s time for him to settle down. Why not try to pick things up with Franca, his childhood sweetheart? So, Gino finds Franca and their relationship is quick to blossom. They move in together and marry, and Franca gives birth to Elio, a baby boy whose extraordinary beauty (“there’s nothing about him that isn’t exquisite.
It’s unbelievable. It’s almost shocking”) draws people from far and wide, as if “setting eyes on him would amount to a kind of blessing”. At the same time, Gino’s jealousy of Franca’s former lover overcomes him, and he’s consumed by “the creeping, almost morbid sensation” that Elio has nothing to do with him.
Thomson’s writing casts an almost otherworldly spell; the writing is lucid, and laced with a sense of foreboding through dreams that poison Gino’s waking state, leaving him “feeling that terrible events awaited”. This sense of menace is made all the more potent by an idyllic evocation of the couple’s early carefree romance (“lying naked on a blanket after making love, the kitchen window and the door wide open”), and its mythological scope, such as when Franca and Gino visit a ruined temple to seek the blessing of Diana, who “wasn’t just the goddess of the hunt.
She was the goddess of childbirth as well”. Then there’s Gino’s feverish descent into paranoid jealousy, and the shocking tragedy that comes in its wake.
Teeming with tension. Dark is the Morning represents literary fiction at its most page-turningly thrilling, and poignant.
| Primary Genre | Literary Fiction |
| Other Genres: | |
| Recommendations: |
Sometimes love isn't where you belong In a small town in the Abruzzo region of Italy, Gino, a troubled young man, realises that his childhood sweetheart Franca can give his life the happiness and stability he needs. They seem made for each other, and move to a remote house in the countryside.
Dark Is the Morning features in the following genres: Books of the Month, Star Books, General Fiction, Literary Fiction, Modern and Contemporary Fiction, General Fiction, Fiction
Paperback, Hardback. £18.00, down from the £20.00 cover price. In Stock.
Dark Is the Morning was written by Rupert Thomson and published by Apollo an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing (UK)
Dark Is the Morning has 256 pages
£18.00, reduced from £20.00. In Stock.
