Incarcerated for the murder of his wife, Giacomo Musso avows his innocence in this sweeping story of prejudice and ill-fated love
It was devotion, or perhaps misfortune, that led Giacomo Musso, a thirty-five-year-old teacher, to incarceration in the maximum-security wing of the Novara penitentiary. He insists on his innocence while the newspapers run photos of the mutilated corpse of his wife. Out of desperation, Giacomo tells the story of his life—that is, the series of events that inevitably led him to this cell.
Their marriage was not a red-hot affair, but rather a passion that grew slowly and steadily—a love meant to last. He and his wife, Shirin, decided to move back to Molini, the town in the Piedmontese mountains where Giacomo had been born. Shirin, raised in France after her family fled Iran, wanted the security of Giacomo's roots. But even in Molini, she remained a foreigner, treated with hate, intolerance, and bigotry. As Shirin becomes more isolated from the people around her, she grows increasingly distant from her husband. Before long, nothing is left of her or of their love, except for the memories Giacomo writes down in his diary in the hope that perhaps he can create a better ending to the story.