The Eight Mountains
NOW A MAJOR FILM
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4.7 • 6 Ratings
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- £4.99
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- £4.99
Publisher Description
NOW A MAJOR FILM
'With air in its lungs and love in its heart' Guardian *****
An epic journey of friendship and self-discovery set in the breath-taking Italian Alps, about two boys who meet in the same village every summer, and the men they grow up to become.
Pietro, an impressionable city boy, spends his summers in a secluded valley in the Alps. There, surrounded by meadows and peaks, he begins to learn of his father's dreams and passions. There, too, he meets Bruno, the son of a local stonemason. As the pair run wild, they form a once-in-a-lifetime friendship.
Then one year, the summer visits stop. Pietro is drawn to cities around the world. But the memory of the mountains never leaves him and, after his father dies, he returns in search of the freedom and camaraderie that he once knew.
'Exquisite... A rich, achingly painful story' ANNIE PROULX, author of The Shipping News
'ENCHANTING' Guardian
'BRILLIANT' New York Times
'ABSORBING' Irish Times
Winner of the 2017 Strega Prize, the Prix Médicis étranger, and the Jury Prize at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Written with the reflection and sensitivity of a memoir, Cognetti's meditative debut explores the intertwined lives of two young men from opposite ends of the social spectrum. Pietro Guasti is 11 years old and contending with his chemist father's demanding mountain-climbing regimen when he befriends Bruno Guglielmina, a cow herder his age living in the shadow of Italy's Monte Rosa. Though the two become close confidants, Pietro, who has worldly ambitions, believes that the more parochial and rugged Bruno would have made a "more suitable" son for his father. When a tragic incident that shaped Pietro's father comes to light, Pietro senses further that he and Bruno "were actually living inside my father's dream." Cognetti takes his novel's title from a Nepalese legend about the different varieties of human experience, and the story illustrates how Pietro and Bruno, despite the dissimilar paths their lives take, can be understood as different sides of the same soul. His nuanced depiction of his two main characters and the camaraderie they share gives his spiritually uplifting tale gravity and texture.
