The Plague-Spreader’s Tale

Bufalino’s first novel, written in 1950 but not published until 1981 after encouragement from Leonardo Sciascia, draws heavily on the author’s own experience of confinement to a sanatorium immediately after the Second World War. He had fought with the partisans, but contracted tubercolosis and was expected to die from it, along with many others. Despite its subject matter, this is a moving, poetic, bitter-sweet elegy to life as a gift that may never be taken for granted.

“This novel is utterly beautiful, a work of unusually terse expressive force…it might have been drawn towards pessimism but in fact it puts pessimism to flight” – Corriere della Sera

Winner of the Campiello Prize.

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