Carmen Pellegrino 
The Earth is Falling [EPUB ebook] 

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.

Despre autor

Shaun Whiteside is an award-winning translator from Italian, French, German and Dutch. He has translated many works of fiction and non-fiction as well as classical and philosophical texts, notably works by Freud and Nietzsche in Penguin Classics. His translations from Italian include works by Giorgio Pressburger, Paolo Giordano, Wu Ming/Luther Blissett, Tiziano Scarpa, Salvatore Niffoi and Nicola Pugliese. Shaun Whiteside’s translation of Lilian Faschinger’s Magdalena the Sinner won the Schlegel-Tieck Prize in 1996, while his translation of Q by Luther Blissett was short-listed for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2004. His translation of To Die in Spring by Ralf Rothmann won the Sharpe Books HWA Gold Crown for History Writing in 2018 and his translation from the French of Serotonin by Michel Houellebecq was long-listed for the International Man Booker Prize in 2021. His reviews have appeared in the TLS, the New Statesman, Guardian, Observer, Irish Times and the Literary Review, and he has taught translation at Birkbeck, City University and BCLT. A former chair of the UK Translators Association, he is currently President of CEATL, the European Council of Literary Translators’ Associations.