Pavese's last novel before his suicide in a Turin hotel in 1950 follows a man returning to the Piedmontese hills after twenty years in California, looking for the friends and landscapes he left behind. The book is set in the countryside outside Turin but the city sits at the edge of every chapter — an indifferent industrial capital that has nothing to say to the returning emigrant.
It is the great Piedmontese novel about leaving and not quite being able to return. Pavese is buried in Santo Stefano Belbo, the village where the book is set, an hour south of Turin.