Satellites are celestial bodies drawn to one another along parallel orbits, never colliding. Filippo and Tommaso have been like that from the very first day of their friendship: bound by an irresistible force that drives them to seek each other out and push each other away, in a motion that never comes to rest. At the centre of their orbit lies Fassiano, a village at the foot of the mountains that seems cut off from the rest of the world. It is 1985, and Filippo has just moved there with his mother after his father abandoned them. They are staying with his grandmother Sandra, who opens her door to them again after years of silence and resentment. Tommaso, by contrast, was born and raised in Fassiano: the village lanes and the woods surrounding it are all he has ever known. Filippo is drawn to him at once, and soon realizes that behind Tommaso’s wary, almost feral manner lies a troubled past: he has never known his mother and lives with a father who, when he drinks, loses control and takes his anger out on him. Whenever they can, the two boys retreat to their secret place, a room at the back of Sandra’s house. Between them grows a raw, magnetic attraction, though neither knows what to call it. One step farther back, just outside their orbit, is Rebecca, the daughter of the owner of Fassiano’s only bar. When Filippo leaves to do his military service, it is Rebecca who fills the space he has left behind in Tommaso’s life. Everything comes crashing down one winter night, when the snow falls so thickly that it seems to erase the world. That night will hurl Filippo far away from Fassiano and from Tommaso, knocking him off course for many years. But perhaps not forever. In his debut novel, Emanuele Bosso has crafted a voice as spare and lucid as the white, silent landscapes through which his characters move, a voice capable of building subterranean tension and stirring emotion through what it leaves unsaid. He tells the story of two lonely lives that find one another and protect each other from the violence of their fathers and of the world.