Old Flame

Walter Montemagno, fifty-six, an IT executive at a large company in Catania, has lived for twenty-seven years a steady and respectable life beside his wife Eleonora and their three children. One November morning, stepping out of his usual café, he meets Delia Marraffa on the threshold - the woman he loved madly in his youth and lost, thirty years earlier, to his own jealousy.The encounter rekindles a flame Walter believed long buried. What follows is a clandestine affair lasting more than two years, built on invented business trips, second phones, and lies elaborated with the same methodical precision Walter brings to his work. When Eleonora discovers everything - through a private investigator and the unmistakable photographs of a secret life - her reaction goes far beyond separation and accusations: she carries out a silent, premeditated revenge.One April evening, Walter and Delia are deliberately run down on a dark street in Catania. Walter suffers serious fractures; Delia falls into a coma for eleven days and, on waking, remembers nothing of the last three years. She doesn't remember Walter. While the police investigation hunts for a hit-and-run driver and the couple's children begin to suspect their mother, Walter must face the hardest challenge of his life: to win back the love of a woman who looks at him as a stranger.Rekindled is a novel that interweaves passion and crime, guilt and redemption, memory and identity. With an atmospheric Sicilian setting and a narrative tension that never lets up, it poses an uncomfortable question: how far can betrayed love drive a person who believed herself an angel? English translation of the Italian novel Ritorno di Fiamma