Palermo, Sicily, 1978. The Christian Democrat leader Aldo Moro has just been kidnapped in Rome by members of the notorious Red Brigades. Two months after his disappearance on 9th May, Moro is found dead in the boot of a car.

A trio of 11-year-old schoolboys, Nimbo, Raggio, and Volo, avidly follow the news of the abduction as their admiration for the brigatisti grows. When the boys themselves resolve to abduct a classmate and incarcarete him in a makeshift ‘people’s prison’, the darkness within their world, and the world of the novel, becomes all-pervasive.

Time on My Hands was shortlisted for the Italian Booker Prize, il Premio Strega, in 2008 and has been translated into many languages. A vivid and hellish description of Sicily in the late ’70s and an extraordinary journey into a world of fierce absolutism, Time on My Hands is an unforgettable novel from one of the most arresting new voices to arrive from Italy in the past decade.

‘A politicised Lord of the Flies… sophisticated, fascinating fiction.’
Independent