This recording has been digitally produced, by DeepZen Limited, using a synthesized version of an audiobook narrator's voice under license. DeepZen uses Emotive Speech Technology to create digital narrations that offer a similar listening experience to human narration.

He must escape.

Illegitimate and orphaned, Gian-Luca is brought up by his Italian grandparents in their prosperous salumeria in Old Compton Street, Soho. Here, surrounded by plenty—by bottles of Chianti in straw petticoats, by pasta and garlic, strings of sausages and jars of dark olives—he lacks that more important sustenance of the soul.

A stranger in the land of his birth, denied religious identity and human love, Gian-Luca grows to maturity seeking to resolve a terrible conflict between the needs of his spirit and the demands of the material world. In the acclaimed Adam's Breed Gian-Luca becomes disgusted with his job and goes to live in the forest as a hermit, with devastating consequences.