The Night Battles

Historian Joan Severance returns to the Sicily of her childhood, ostensibly to do research in archives newly opened in the remote fortress town of Valparuta. In truth, her academic career lies in ruins behind her—she has been relieved of her teaching duties at Brown University after assaulting a student. Unable to approach her own long-buried history of loss and displacement, Joan has become obsessed with the lost possessions of those long dead—all the objects, furniture, clothing and tools she finds recorded in Renaissance probates. But Valparuta, Joan discovers, is haunted, too. Unseen hands vandalize its homes and streets; the archivist, Cosimo Chiesa, suffers invisible blows. As Joan’s disturbed, hyper-intuitive mind falls increasingly under Valparuta’s spell, the embattled Chiesa begins a subtle campaign of seduction and tutelage whose purpose—at once shocking and inevitable—will force Joan to confront her unacknowledged past. A spellbinding, fiercely original novel of love, intrigue and psychological suspense, The Night Battles maps landscapes— real and imagined—where dream and belief, memory and longing, desire and obsession converge.