The Lovers

From the author of international bestseller The Eight Mountains comes a story of love and community in the wild beauty of the Italian Alps 
 
The remote alpine village of Fontana Fredda lives by the seasons. These quiet, complex rhythms appeal to Fausto, who has left the city of Milan behind, and with it his relationship. He takes a job as chef in a little restaurant and entrusts himself to new beginnings. 
 
Silvia is also seeking change: her sights are on the glaciers where, she has read, climbing a thousand metres towards the sky is equivalent to travelling ten times the same distance to the north. She is in search of her personal North Pole. 
 
When Fausto and Silvia meet one night, their story begins: a tender story of love and renewal; of the community that sustains them; and of lives humbled by the implacable strength and beauty of the mountains. 
 
As intimate in focus as it is epic in scope, The Lovers is a luminous meditation on our quest to understand our place in one another's lives, and in the magnificence of the world around us. 
 
Praise for The Eight Mountains: 
'Exquisite... A rich, achingly painful story' Annie Proulx 
'Enchanting' Guardian 
'Brilliant' New York Times

A masterclass in high-altitude atmosphere, a sharp portrait of a community and a touching romance, all condensed into 200 pages... [and] elegantly translated by Stash Luczkiw

A beautiful meditation on nature, love, and renewal.

A novel of pure love - love for nature, love for people, just simply love - that lifts the soul and the heart.

An enchanting ode to nature that explores the fissures and cracks of human relationships and second chances in life with an immense, luminous power.

Paolo Cognetti (Author) Paolo Cognetti was born in 1978 in Milan. He divides his time between the city and his cabin 6,000 feet up in the Italian Alps. His international bestseller, The Eight Mountains, won Italy’s Premio Strega and is now a major film. His other acclaimed titles include Without Ever Reaching the Summit: A Himalayan Journey, and The Lovers. Stash Luczkiw (Translator) Stash Luczkiw is a US-born writer of poetry, fiction and journalism. He has translated various books from Italian and other languages into English.

The remote alpine village of Fontana Fredda lives by the seasons. These quiet, complex rhythms appeal to Fausto, who has left the city of Milan behind, and with it his relationship. He takes a job as chef in a little restaurant and entrusts himself to new beginnings. 
 
Silvia is also seeking change: her sights are on the glaciers where, she has read, climbing a thousand metres towards the sky is equivalent to travelling ten times the same distance to the north. She is in search of her personal North Pole. 
 
When Fausto and Silvia meet one night, their story begins: a tender story of love and renewal; of the community that sustains them; and of lives humbled by the implacable strength and beauty of the mountains. 
 
As intimate in focus as it is epic in scope, The Lovers is a luminous meditation on our quest to understand our place in one another's lives, and in the magnificence of the world around us.

NOW A MAJOR FILM

The Eight Mountains

The international sensation about two young Italian boys from different backgrounds who meet in the mountains every summer, and the men they grow to become

NOW A MAJOR FILM 
 
'With air in its lungs and love in its heart' Guardian ***** 
 
An epic journey of friendship and self-discovery set in the breath-taking Italian Alps, about two boys who meet in the same village every summer, and the men they grow up to become. 
 
Pietro, an impressionable city boy, spends his summers in a secluded valley in the Alps. There, surrounded by meadows and peaks, he begins to learn of his father's dreams and passions. There, too, he meets Bruno, the son of a local stonemason. As the pair run wild, they form a once-in-a-lifetime friendship. 
 
Then one year, the summer visits stop. Pietro is drawn to cities around the world. But the memory of the mountains never leaves him and, after his father dies, he returns in search of the freedom and camaraderie that he once knew. 
 
'Exquisite... A rich, achingly painful story' ANNIE PROULX, author of The Shipping News 
 
'ENCHANTING' Guardian 
'BRILLIANT' New York Times 
'ABSORBING' Irish Times 
 
Winner of the 2017 Strega Prize, the Prix Médicis étranger, and the Jury Prize at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival.

A fine book, a rich, achingly painful story that is made for all of us who have ever felt a hunger for the mountains. Few books have so accurately described the way stony heights can define one’s sense of joy and rightness. And it is an exquisite unfolding of the deep way humans may love one another.

Could Cognetti be the new Elena Ferrante?

A great story about friendship and about what it means to become a man

There are no more universal themes than those of the landscape, friendship, and becoming adults, and Cognetti’s writing becomes classical (and elegant) to best tell this story…a true novel by a great writer

A beautifully crafted piece of writing... Absorbing... The power of nature to transform the individual, for good and for bad, is seen through each of the characters

The Eight Mountains is a novel about love for the mountains, but more than that it is about those male relationships that rely on the slow accumulation of understanding where nothing is directly expressed: men, while feeling a lot, say very little, and, tragically, sometimes this can be fatal. Cognetti’s novel, poetic and properly romantic, achieves a moving grandeur

A profound tale about male friendship, its consolations and shortcomings, set in the Italian Alps

100 Best Books to Read This Summer, The Times

With gorgeously understated, unhurried prose, Cognetti crafts the story of an unlikely friendship between a city boy named Pietro and a young cow herder, Bruno, who lives in the Alpine mountains where the members of Pietro’s family spend their vacations. You can feel the cycles of nature as the narrative unfolds

The Eight Mountains is... Paolo Cognetti’s enchanting story of a boy who comes of age at altitude

A boy bonds with a local while holidaying in Italy’s mountains in a thoughtful...coming-of-age story... A story of relationships – not just between people, but with the mountains... Cognetti captures the elation and melancholy that comes with reaching a spectacular summit, only to realise the minuscule part we play in the panorama of life

Down in the Valley

Paolo Cognetti (Author) 
Paolo Cognetti was born in 1978 in Milan. He divides his time between the city and his cabin 6,000 feet up in the Italian Alps. His international bestseller, The Eight Mountains, won Italy’s Premio Strega and is now a major film. His other acclaimed titles include Without Ever Reaching the Summit: A Himalayan Journey, and The Lovers. 
 
Stash Luczkiw (Translator) 
Stash Luczkiw is a US-born writer of poetry, fiction and journalism. He has translated various books from Italian and other languages into English.

Fredo and Luigi grew up in Valsesia, in northern Italy. Their father planted trees for them when they were born: for Luigi, a larch, which looks towards the sun and waves in the wind; for Fredo, a pine, which flourishes only in the shade. 
 
Since the death of their father, all the two brothers have had in common is their heavy drinking and the old family home, high up on the mountain. Luigi would like to buy Fredo out, to start a new life with Betta and the baby girl they are expecting. But in this remote and testing landscape, one drink too many, one wrong word, can turn dogs into wolves.

Paolo Cognetti

Stash Luczkiw

A Himalayan Journey

An awestruck love letter to one of the most spectacular places on earth, from the author of international bestseller The Eight Mountains 
 
Paolo Cognetti marked his 40th birthday with a journey he had always wanted to make: to Dolpo, a remote Himalayan region where Nepal meets Tibet. He took with him two friends, a notebook, mules and guides, and a well-worn copy of The Snow Leopard. Written in 1978, Matthiessen's classic was also turning forty, and Cognetti set out to walk in the footsteps of the great adventurer. 
 
Without Ever Reaching the Summit combines travel journal, secular pilgrimage, literary homage and sublime mountain writing in a short book for readers of Macfarlane, Rebanks and Cognetti's own bestseller, The Eight Mountains. An investigation into the author's physical limits, an ancient mountain culture, and the magnificence of nature, it is an awestruck love letter to one of the most spectacular places on earth.

Paolo Cognetti

Books by Paolo Cognetti

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter