When three friends return to their small hometown of Casalfranco in southern Italy to honor a longstanding pact, their friend Art doesn’t show ... Always one for drama, Art has left a trail of mysterious stories in his wake. He’s growing and selling weed. He healed the daughter of a Mafia king. Even in his absence, Art’s alluring antics have a strong pull on his friends ... Through multiple perspectives, Dimitri weaves a tale of adventure, mystery, friendship and heart-wrenching beauty that will make you re-examine what is holy, what is true and what is beyond the realm of possibility.
Four childhood friends make a pact to meet in their home village every year on the same date. Fabio, a photographer, lawyer Marco, and Tony, a doctor, arrive as usual. When Art, the originator of the pact, doesn’t show, the friends worry ... Making his debut writing in English, Italian author Dimitri crafts an emotional tale that is less about hidden supernatural things and more about the things we hide from our friends and from ourselves.
...Set in the far south of Italy, in the small town of Casalfranco, almost but not quite too small for tourist attention. Four friends, on graduating high school, pledge to meet at the same pizzeria once a year, no matter what else may be going on in their lives. Fabio, Tony, and Mauro all arrive on time, but their peculiar friend Art does not. Art...leaves behind a manuscript, the titular Book of Hidden Things, and the supernatural explanation it suggests for his absences is not one his friends are readily prepared to entertain.
Mauro, Tony, Fabio, and Art have been friends since their school days in a southern Italian village. When Art, their ringleader, suggests that they return each year on the same date to meet up, they agree, and for 17 years they keep their promise. But when Art is a no-show, memories quickly surface of a bizarre incident from their teen years when he wandered into an olive grove and vanished for seven days ... The reader gets a bird’s eye view of the secrets the men keep from each other, both about their complicated presents and their different understandings of Art’s first disappearance years ago. Is the Mafia involved? The local priest? The mentally ill woman Art was seeing? What of the rumor that Art healed a terminally ill girl before his latest vanishing? And how is his absence tied in to an odd manuscript he was writing called The Book of Hidden Things? ... Dimitri has created a spectacle that also manages to point poignantly at the way the landscapes we grow up in shape us in ways even beyond our understanding.
...Italian author Dimitri’s first novel written in English, about a group of friends who have a pact to meet annually in their small Italian hometown, is an evocative meditation on friendship, adulthood, and the liminal spaces that lie just outside human perception. Tony, a surgeon; Mauro, a lawyer; and Fabio, a fashion photographer, show up to their meeting place in Casalfranco, but Art, who formed the pact 17 years before, never arrives ... Dimitri’s...tale, steeped in nostalgia, folklore, and religion, will enthrall and terrify readers.
