Francesco Dimitri’s The Book of Hidden Things (Titan, £8.99) rapidly draws the reader into the story of four childhood friends, now in their 30s. Every year for almost two decades they have met up in their hometown, the small Italian village of Casalfranco. When Arturo, at whose insistence this pact was formed, fails to show up, the three concerned friends investigate and discover that he’s been leading a secret life: not only has he been growing marijuana on a large scale, but he has supposedly cured a young girl of leukaemia. They also learn that he’s written a manuscript entitled The Book of Hidden Things, which suggests that he has access to a world hidden from our own. But is his disappearance connected to this manuscript and an event in his childhood, when he vanished for a week and returned very much changed, or is there a more mundane explanation? Dimitri’s first novel in English, written with breezy fluency, is an affecting fable of friendship, magic and nostalgia.
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