After Hannibal

Description

“A brilliant novel, exquisitely precise in its analysis of evil twisting its way through ordinary lives.” ―Claire Hopley, Boston Globe

From the Booker Prize-winning author of Sacred Hunger, "a vivid, sinuous, profound, and entirely beguiling venture." ―Richard Eder, Los Angeles Times. Set in the beautiful landscape and rich history of Umbria, Italy, Booker Prize-winning author Barry Unsworth has written a witty and illuminating work of contemporary manners and morals. The region where Hannibal defeated the Romans is now prey to a different type of invasion: outsiders buying villas with innocent and not so innocent dreams. Among those clustered along one hillside road are the Greens, a retired American couple seeking serenity; the Chapmans, whose dispute over a wall escalates into a feud of operatic proportions; and Fabio and Arturo, a gay couple who, searching for peace and self-sufficiency, find treachery instead. Add to this mix a wily and corrupt British "building expert," and a lawyer who practices subterfuge and plans his client s actions like military strategy, and you have a sharp, entertaining, and satisfyingly bittersweet work.Barry Unsworth, who lives in Umbria, has chosen to set his latest novel, After Hannibal, among the wandering lanes and ancient fields he knows well. His cast of characters is a diverse bunch that includes a homosexual couple named Fabio and Arturo; a mentally unstable German named Ritter; the Greens, an American couple; the morose Italian historian Monti; and the Chapmans, a dull British couple at war with a local family, the Checchettis, over maintenance of a wall that fronts the country lane they both share. Unsworth uses geographical propinquity to link them all together and then throws in another common bond as well: the crafty lawyer Mancini, whom almost all have cause to consult at one time or another during the course of the novel.

Unsworth s darkly comic novel of greed, perfidy, and deceit occupies a landscape all too familiar with such things; Umbria is, after all, the place where Carthaginian invaders under Hannibal ambushed and slaughtered an entire Roman legion. Tactics have changed since the days of Hannibal, but the Umbria of After Hannibal is still a treacherous locale.