AustLit

'Agata Rosso, a once-mighty yet now prematurely aged European witch, believes that the special gifts in a young girl named Lía Munro can restore youth and vitality both to herself and her bedridden husband. She sets a deadly plan in motion to capture and use Lía—but will the girl have enough power to protect herself, plus the father she loves so much?'

Source: Publisher's blurb

'Charlie Smoke is living out his early retirement from the boxing ring as a bricklayer. It is the mid-1970s and he believes his best days are behind him. He has lost his wife and his daughter Sissy to his questionable past. When he meets Holly Banks and her teenage son Ricky, he has the chance to do things differently this time around.

'As an unlikely friendship develops with Ricky, Charlie is unwittingly pulled back into the gambling underworld he thought he had left behind. In order to make a new future, first he must settle some old scores. Burning Down is a searing new novel from acclaimed storyteller Venero Armanno about family, regret, love and the promise of salvation.' 

Source: Publication summary

Travel Under Any Star is a collection of stories from 1993 to 2016. This is Armanno's first collected stories and includes the title story 'Travel Under Any Star'; a brand new novella length piece never before published.

'The little bundle was falling from the sky and then he was awake, and he listened to this cold season's early westerly winds shaking loose the world outside. The bedroom was almost dark though achingly bright moonlight filtered one window, creating slashes of clarity over the carved Rosewood Chinese palace armchair Laura had rescued and painstakingly restored from some roadside trash collection. From where he cowered, the side of this face pressed to his pillow, he saw more shards of light: falling across the floor's oriental rug; over two perfume bottles and a hairbrush on the night-stand; one white streak was across Laura's scattered winter clothes. ' (Introduction)

' Beginning in the sulphur mines of Sicily over a century ago, Black Mountain takes you on a journey through time and back again. When a boy sold into slavery finds the courage to escape his brutal life, he is saved by a mysterious stranger, who raises the boy as his own. Renamed Cesare Montenero after Sicily's own 'black mountain', Mount Etna, the boy grows up to discover that his rescue was no accident, that his physical strength is unnatural, and that he has more in common with his saviour than he could have imagined. And when he meets the enigmatic Celeste, he suspects for the first time that he many not be alone.

Based on factual events and ranging through Italy, Paris and the rural fringes of coastal Australia, Black Mountain is a haunting exploration of what it means to be human.' Source: www.uqp.uq.edu.au/ (Sighted 02/07/2012).