Dark is the Morning takes place in Abruzzo, Italy, predominantly in the early 2000s. At its centre is a relationship between Gino, who after a mis-spent youth is trying to get his life back on track, and Franca, who told him when they were children that they would one day marry. The novel is set up as a romance, in which two outsiders look set to make amends for their failure to get it together during some initial adventures as teenagers. However, we know from the start that things are unlikely to be as simple as that, via means of words that conclude its introductory chapter, narrated by the Englishman Harry who (from the present day) refers ominously to ‘those events’ that took place in the early 2000s.

How to Make a Bomb was initially published last year in the US under the somewhat less provocative title Dartmouth Park. It’s a short novel, written in a sparse poetic style, eschewing paragraphs in favour of short sentences with line breaks and limited punctuation. Its focus is the fifty-year-old London-based historian Philip Notman, who is thrown into a deep personal crisis following a trip to a conference in Bergen. On his return he begins to struggle to pick up with his everyday life, and abandons his wife and (adult) son to head off in search of… something. Initially it seems that that something may be an affair, with the captivating Ines, who he met at the Bergen conference and initially seeks out in Cadiz. Yet relatively soon he is on the move again, this time to Crete to spend time in the dilapidated house of an older couple he helped out in Spain. He arrives seeking fulfillment of a different kind, away from the noise of modern life, and is further tempted by the allure of religion on a visit to a monastery. When all of this ultimately fails to resolve his issues, he heads back to London with a new sense of purpose, and a rather disturbing mission.