Il ladro di giorni

Salvo, 11, from Bari, hates many things. When you get hurt and the grown-ups tell you “don’t worry, you didn’t do anything,” but they make you get a tetanus shot. When you write a good paper and you don’t even get to be happy with it because the teacher reads it in front of the whole class and you feel ashamed. And especially when they talk to you as if you were a child, sounding out the words, as if you didn’t already know them all, even the vulgar ones. Like his father, Vincenzo, does. Salvo has not seen him for seven years, that is, since two men took him away, to a special school where, however, at the end of classes they never let him go home. Now Vincenzo is out of prison, has joined Salvo at his aunt and uncle’s in Udine, and wants his son to accompany him to Bari, where he has a mission to accomplish. Four days: a huge amount of time for Salvo, who does not want to leave with the man full of strange tattoos who does things in secret, as if he has a secret. But also a chance for father and son to get to know and talk to each other again. An on-the-road journey to southern Italy, punctuated by encounters at truck stops, life lessons and memories of a childhood still candid and full of questions, before the mysterious “thief of days” arrives. An exciting coming-of-age novel in which the roles of father and son are often reversed, in a continuous mutual discovery.