The Devil in the Hills (Peter Owen Modern Classic)

A brooding novel, the sort with no vulgar action, The Devil in the Hills holds one rapt with the atmosphere it creates. It is a simple story of three students who fall in with a decadent older couple and end up spending time with them at their remote country estate. A gun appears early in the novel, and though it does go off once, the convulsive explosion with which one expects the novel to end, and to which a lesser novelist would have had recourse, never occurs. Instead it is the relationship among the friends, the descriptions of Italian city, village, and country life, the beauty of the prose (translated by D.D. Paige) that keeps one turning pages, and convinces one that Pavese was, indeed, an artist of the first rank.