An intensely red, pulsating, blood-stained frozen tree stands as a grim witness to an unspeakable tragedy. Eleven lives were taken simultaneously in a flash, each by a different cause of death, at the foot of this tree in the village of Borgo San Giuda. The forty-two inhabitants of this small town, overwhelmed by the shock of this discovery, now find themselves at the center of media attention.

Once mere bystanders to the evil, they have become the forgotten protagonists of this harrowing tale, collectively sliding into madness. Mète, the young protagonist of "The Touched," has now become Don Ermete, a priest who guards his own secret under the cloth. He cannot abandon his parishioners, and together with Giovanna Gassion, a young psychiatrist fleeing a failed love, he will do everything in his power to save this world of lost and silent souls, who seem so distant yet are, in reality, a reflection of ourselves.

Page by page, the reader is drawn into these modest homes where madness takes root, crossing paths with those desperate and solitary gazes, until finally feeling both weightless and safe, surrendered to the mystery. Sandro Veronesi, a two-time winner of the Strega Prize, has composed a gripping novel that, in the literary tradition of Balzac and Dostoevsky, illuminates the darkest shadows of the human soul with the power of his writing.

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