The Seed Beneath The Snow: A Novel (Vol. 3 of the Abruzzo Trilogy)

The final novel in The Abruzzo Trilogy, The Seed Beneath the Snow, follows the fugitive Pietro Spina as he refuses to accept the conditions of pardon for his sins against the fascist regime and flees to the mountains. In his picture of the cafoni of Abruzzo and their quest for liberation, Silone achieves a wonderful balance of metaphor and realism, as he did in Fontamara and Bread and Wine. An remarkable, unburnished image of the fight between good and evil that, in the words of F. W. Dupee, "communicates to the reader “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…