Foreign rights: Sonia Finotello (sonia.finotello@rizzolilibri.it)

Cli-fi meets family saga in a powerful and visionary novel that narrates, through a family and three generations, the disappearance of the most important Italian glacier.

For those who loved Richard Powers’s masterpiece The Overstory, this is a stunning, thought-provoking piece of fiction for our frightening times, casting a new light on our relationship with nature.

Glacier M has a thousand-year history, and on its sides man has learned to live and survive in trying conditions. The three descendants of the Darman family know this well, their consecutive lives forever connected with the frozen mountain. A soldier risks his life in the ice city and among the snow-covered trenches at the beginning of the twentieth century; a mountain guide fights the tourist invasion in the eighties; and a woman comes to terms with a world that is dying in a future that’s too near. Entwined with their lives is a century of Italian history and the shocking and rapid end of the white giant.

In an exciting narrative like no other, Gabriele Romagnoli has invented a human and environmental epic. A tale of men and women immersed in a changing natural environment, full of fears and hopes, like us.

“When a glacier melts, lives resurface: men and women, wars and loves, feuds and challenges. We fought for the defence of a border, a heritage and, at the end, the environment itself. All too late. The snow’s existence once seemed eternal, will the same be said for mankind? “