The rugged landscape of Baronia on Sardinia sets the scene for this novel of crime, guilt and retribution. This novel presents the story of the Pintor sisters - from a family of noble landowners now in decline - their nephew Giacinto, and their servant Efix, who is trying to make up for a mysterious sin committed many years before. Around, below, and inside them the raging Mediterranean storms, the jagged mountains, the murmuring forests, and the gushing springs form a Greek chorus of witness to the tragic drama of this unforgiving land. Deledda tells her story with her characteristic love of the natural landscape and fascination with the folk culture of the island, with details about the famous religious festivals held in mountain encampments and the lore of the "dark beings who populate the Sardinian night, the fairies who live in rocks and caves, and the sprites with seven red caps who bother sleep." Introduction by the Sardinian ethnographer, Dolores Turchi. "Surely, in a time when the most obscure female novelist may be instantly catapulted to canonical status on the strength of her sex and previous obscurity, a writer of the emotional power of Grazia Deledda is overdue for literary resurrection.... It is easy to be transfixed...by the bluntness of Deledda's characters' emotions, the harshness of their lives, their rawness and violence, sometimes their downright weirdnessor as they say in the academy nowadays, "otherness."... Most of the strangeness in [Deledda's] books does not arise from local color. The strangeness that counts is that of the gnarled, interrupted passions of family life. Rarely are her stories wrapped in impressionist gauze, and for all the folkloric gaudiness, the family patterns are recognizable. Intense bonds are ready-made to break.... There is frequently a biblical quality to Deledda's prose.... It is hard not to feel, when reading her, that whatever the particularities of late l9th Century Sardinians, he! r readers are getting close to some pure ore of human emotion." -Todd Gitlin, Chicago Sunday Tribune -- Publisher Comments Highly recommended for those interested in world-class literature, women's literature, the rapidly vanishing world of the European peasant. -- World Literature Today, Winter 2001 Grazia Deledda was born in 1871 in Nuoro, Sardinia. She had a limited formal education, but was an avid reader. She published her first story in 1886 when she was fifteen, in a newspaper in Nuoro. Her stories continued to be published in one of the many fashion magazines of the late nineteenth century, Ultima Moda. Although the dismay of her family and friends distressed her, it also strengthened her resolve to succeed. In 1899 she left Nuoro and went to Cagliari, where she met and married Palmiro Madesani. A year later they moved to Rome, where Deledda lived a quiet life writing and caring for her husband and two sons until her death in 1936, at sixty-five. Deledda wrote thirty-three novels and many books of short stories, almost all of them set in Sardinia. Among her better-known novels are Elias Portolu, Canne al vento (forthcoming from Italica Press in 1998 as Reeds in the Wind), La madre, Annalena Bilsini, and Cosima (Italica Press, 1988), her posthumous autobiographical novel. Grazia Deledda became, in 1926, the first Italian woman to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. Efix, the Pintor sisters' servant, had worked all day to shore up the primitive river embankment that he had slowly and laboriously built over the years. At nightfall he was contemplating his work from where he was sitting in front of his hut halfway up White Doves' Hill. A blue-green fringe of reeds rustled behind him. Silently stretching out before him down to the river sparkling in the twilight was the little farm that Efix considers more his than the owners': thirty years of possession and work had certainly made it his, and the two hedgerows of prickly pear that enclose it like two gray walls meandering from terrace to terrace, from the hill to the river, are like the boundaries of the world to him. In his survey the servant ignored the land on either side of the farm because it had once been Pintor property. Why dredge up the past? Useless regret. Better to think about the future and hope in God's help. And God promised a good year, or at least He had covered all the almond and peach trees in the valley with blossoms; and this valley, between two rows of white hills covered with spring vegetation, water, scrub, flowers, together with the distant blue mountains to the west and the blue sea to the east, gave the impression of a cradle billowing with green veils and blue ribbons, with the river murmuring monotonously like a sleepy child. But the days were already too hot and Efix was also thinking about the torrential rains that swell the bankless river and make it leap like an all-destroying monster. One could hope, but had to be watchful, like the reeds along the riverbank beating their leaves to