DOMINIC SMITH
A family’s long-buried story is at the heart of a new novel from the best-selling author
What’s the plot of Return to Valetto in a nutshell?
Return to Valetto is the story of a nearly abandoned town in Umbria and the last 10 people who live there. It’s also the story of one family’s reckoning with the past and the town’s excavation of long-buried secrets from WWII.
Is there a book that made you love writing?
When I first read The Transit of Venus published in 1980 by Australian novelist Shirley Hazzard, I was in graduate school and I remember that the power and elegance of the writing completely blew me away. I was humbled and intimidated by it, but I was also inspired by the possibilities of fiction. That has stayed with me.
What’s the best book you’ve read?
That’s always a hard question to answer, but Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf remains for me a pretty perfect book.
The book you couldn’t finish?
(The 1939 Irish novel) James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.
A book that had a pivotal impact on your life?
Tim Winton’s Cloudstreet. I didn’t grow up knowing any writers in Australia, so there was something exhilarating about this story that was quintessentially Australian and that celebrated the workaday poetry of ordinary lives with language that felt alive and fresh on every page.
It was a book that made me want to be a writer.
A book you wish you had read but haven’t got to?
(Nikolai Gogol’s 1842 novel) Dead Souls.
The book you are most proud to have written?
The Last Painting of Sara de Vos, published in 2016.
What book do you re-read?
James Salter’s Light Years for its beautiful sentences. If I’m stuck, I find myself flipping to a page to be reminded of what great writing can do at the line level.
What books are on your bedside table?
The World and All That It Holds by Aleksandar Hemon and the 1953 semi-autobiographical novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin.
What are you writing now?
The fledgling pages of a novel that returns to the world of Dutch Golden Age art, which I’ve missed ever since I wrote The Last Painting of Sara de Vos.