The Seed Beneath the Snow

By Ignazio Silone

The Seed Beneath the Snow, the final novel in The Abruzzo Trilogy, follows the fugitive Pietro Spina as he refuses to accept the conditions of pardon for his transgressions against the fascist state and flees to the mountains. As in Fontamara and Bread and Wine, Silone achieves a rich harmony of allegory and realism in his portrayal of the cafoni of Abruzzo and their struggle for freedom. An extraordinary, unburnished vision of the conflict between good and evil, communicating to its reader, in the words of F. W. Dupee, “Silone’s deep integrity, his sufferings and aspirations, his radical sense of the world’s wrongs.”

I felt my life to be as fragile, as helplessly exposed, and endangered as that of that small, abandoned seed beneath the snow; and at the same time I felt my life to be as natural, as alive, as important as its own, in fact I felt it to be life itself…

Ignazio Silone (1900–1978) was an Italian political leader and novelist. Achieving worldwide recognition during World War II for his forthright anti-Fascist novels, Silone received numerous awards over the course of his career, including the Premio Campiello, the Prix mondial Cino Del Duca, and the Jerusalem Prize, and was nominated ten times for the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Paperback: 460pp.

ISBN: 978-1950970568