The Ninth Keeper of Pietrarossa

About this book

Miresa Skiroi restores dead voices for a living. In a Turin sound lab she coaxes music from rotting tape, which is easier than going home. Home is Pietrarossa Albanese, a shrinking village in the Calabrian hills where people still speak an Albanian carried across the water in 1534, still sing the dead into the ground, and still argue over a hillside a development consortium now wants to level — cemetery, church, and all. Her grandmother Lenuca, silenced by a stroke, can no longer speak. She can still sing. Into Miresa's hands she presses a rusted tin: a 1957 field recording, a brass key, and a claim Miresa has spent her whole adult life outrunning — that she is the ninth keeper of a song no one has ever finished. There are forty days until the graves are moved. The song is missing a verse.