Snow, Dog, Foot

Adelmo Farandola doesn't like people. In summer he roams the valleys, his only company a talkative, cantankerous old dog and a young mountain ranger who, Adelmo Farandola suspects, is spying on him. When winter comes, man and dog are snowed in. With stocks of wine and bread depleted, they pass the time squabbling over scraps, debating who will eat the other first. Spring brings a more sinister discovery that threatens to break Adelmo Farandola's already faltering grip on reality: a man's foot poking out of the receding snow.

Claudio Morandini lives in Aosta, where he balances his career as a writer with his work as a teacher. Neve, cane, piede, first published in 2015 is Morandini's sixth book. The novel is a literary phenomenon; a top-five Italian bestseller, it won the Procida-Elsa Morante-Isola di Arturo prize in 2016 and has been translated into French, Spanish and Turkish. It appears here for the first time in English.