Black Mountain (Venero Armanno, UQP)
This intriguing novel takes you from a small coastal Queensland town to the sulphur minefields of Sicily. There are elements of Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s The Shadow of the Wind and it also reminded me of Andrew McGahan’s Wonders of a Godless World. Armanno tackles life, death and immortality in a page-turning plot that you race through. A young man begins having strange dreams about a faceless creature. He turns his nightmare into a screenplay for a horror film and tries to sell his idea, only to be accused of stealing the idea from a 50-year-old Italian novel. He tries to track down the author, who he discovers is still alive, and in the process discovers a set of buried journals which detail an extraordinary tale. The majority of the novel is told through the various discovered journals, and this is where the book is at its best. The first part was harder to get into—I didn’t quite connect with the young man and there were one too many coincidences for my liking. But once you hit the journals you get lost in a fascinating world of slavery, war and the quest for eternal life.
Jon Page is the general manager of Pages & Pages Booksellers in Mosman, Sydney and president of the ABA
Category: Reviews
