Most affected is Connie, a young shop assistant, whose daily ‘potato-sorting’ leaves her ‘chilled by the ordinariness of her life’. The arrival of two young Italians, ‘the light of a foreign sun in their hair’, catalyses Connie’s escape fantasies; they are ‘a peek through the gaps in the hedgerows to a world beyond the villages’. Courted by brash, ambitious Vittorio, Connie is instead drawn to introverted, artistic Lucio, whose scarring wartime ordeal in his mountain village of Montelupini forms the story’s second plot line.

For most of the novel, the war itself is a distant concept. In Montelupini, bored Vittorio laments its absence: ‘everything exciting is happening miles away’. In Leyton, it has passed Connie by as ‘a series of small intrusions from some other world’. Riccioni taps a strange vein of period and place, the two communities maintaining their gossipy, mundane lives in the shadows of a violent maelstrom.

Then war hits Montelupini with a force that unbalances the dual narratives. As Lucio’s family starves and suffers, it becomes difficult to empathise with Connie’s anxiety over ‘the monotonous score of her own existence’. She doesn’t need an exotic foreigner anyway: ‘there’s so much on offer now for young women, ever since the war’.
By the novel’s end, however, we understand the appeal of the dull English countryside to the foreigner, who is escaping the tragedies of ‘a past that could make them so hungry for the paltry offerings of Leyton’.