The Earth is Falling

The Earth is Falling is a haunting and magical novel based around the existence of an abandoned village outside Naples. The deserted houses that still stand there are peopled with ghosts who live in a perpetual present from which time has effectively been abolished. The village appears to be semi-alive; the landslide which ominously awaits and which will eventually lead to the abandonment of the place has yet to arrive (yet its rumbles are heard). Pellegrino peoples Alento with eccentrics, luminaries, an eternally optimistic town crier. In the closing pages, the narrator Estella summons the remaining ghosts for a final dinner. The overall effect is unsettling, haunting and uncanny, the trapped souls doomed to repeat their circumscribed daily life for ever, cut off from the world but dimly aware of its continued presence outside.

Carmen Pellegrino is an Italian historian and writer (b. Polla 1977). An eclectic scholar, she has investigated some of the salient knots of modernity, concentrating her studies on collective movements of dissidence (as in Neapolitan 1968. Student struggles and social conflicts between conservatism and utopias, 2008), and subsequently focusing her research on racism, social exclusion and the conditions of exploitation of migrants (including the essay 'The hours of my day', published in the anthology Qui and Fatigue: stories, tales and reportage from the world of work, 2010, winner of the award reportage Napoli Monitor). Co-author of various collective works (Strozzateci tutti, 2010; Novantadue, 2012), in 2011 she edited with C. Zagaria the volume Not a country for women: stories of extraordinary normality, in which she published an essay on Matilde Sorrentino. Among her most recent central themes of investigation is that of uninhabited villages and the ruins of ancient settlements, through whose study Pellegrino laid the foundations for a science of abandonment as a form of recovering awareness of the historical experience of places. Pellegrino's novels to date are Cade la terra (2015), which was shortlisted for the Campiello prize, If I came back this evening next (2017) and The happiness of others (2021, shortlisted for the Campiello prize).