‘In 1969,’ says Venero Armanno in the letter to the reader that prefaces his new novel, ‘my parents took me to Sicily for the first time, and we lived for six months in the tiny village of their birth. What I remember most clearly … is the presence of the volcano, and just how absolutely it dominates life. It’s there smoking silently in the day, and at night … you can see the fiery glow in the mouth of cratere centrale – that fire which can never be put out.’

He also remembers, he says, ‘the poverty, the superstition, the chickens and rabbits crawling and sleeping under your bed, and the glorious cooking that would go on day and night’. And one way or another all these things find their way into this enormous, irresistible novel, but it’s dominated by the image of ‘that fire which can never be put out’.