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.
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