The Break Page 14

  “What’s up, son?”

  Dino looked up and saw Cirillo standing there beyond the table with his hands in his pockets. He looked up at him for a few seconds, still crouching there at the edge of the table. Cirillo tried to read the expression in Dino’s blackened and hollow eyes.

  “Why didn’t you ever tell me?” Dino asked.

  Cirillo frowned slightly. “Why didn’t I ever tell you what?” he replied.

  “That the ball never comes back to the same place,” Dino said.

  Cirillo let his eyes fall for a moment on the white ball in front of Dino, sitting there, nice and quiet, on the green baize, where it ought to be. Then he looked at Dino again and he felt the impulse to smile.

  “You got so close, I didn’t like to tell you,” he said.

  Also by Pietro Grossi

  FISTS

  Translated by Howard Curtis

  £7.99 ISBN 978-1-906548-38-4

  Three stories, three portraits of young men learning the realities of adult life.

  Boxing takes us into the world of gyms, a world of bodies, of nerves stretched to the limit, of sacrifice and challenge. Two young men confront each other in the fight of their lives.

  Horses takes us into the wide open spaces of the countryside. Here, two brothers, both given horses by their father, confront each other sensing that two different destinies are opening up for them.

  The Monkey, is about the fragility of identity, the desire to escape it and disappear.

  In Fists, Pietro Grossi has written three epics of the everyday, in which his characters, bound together by fate, struggle to find a meaning in human existence.

  “The greatest addition to Italian literature for a very long time.”

  Il Domenicale

  “A perfect book.”

  Il Sole 24 Ore