What begins as a listless excursion to a medieval equestrian competition turns into a hallucinatory nightmare for Maggione and his wife, awakening their dormant libido, for each other but, more dangerously, for others in their entourage. The death of the jockey is only one of the mysterious goings-on to be solved. It soon becomes clear that there are no bystanders in the Palio.
Authors: Carlo Fruttero and Franco Lucentini were a well-known literary duo in Italy for several decades until Lucentini’s death (by suicide) in 2002. For about forty years they co-wrote newspaper articles, literary essays, and published six groundbreaking and best-selling mystery novels. Their first novel, The Sunday Woman, was made into a film in 1975 starring Marcello Mastroianni, Jacqueline Bisset and Jean-Louis Trintignant. Runaway Horses and The Lover of No Fixed Abode, first published in 1980s, are the third and fourth, respectively of their novels.
Translator: Gregory Dowling grew up in Bristol, UK. He read English Literature at Christ Church, Oxford. He moved to Italy after graduating and has lived there since 1979, teaching in Naples, Siena, Verona and eventually Venice, where he has lived since 1981. He published four thrillers in the 1980s and 1990s and then devoted himself to academic work and translation. He returned to fiction in 2015, with his novel set in 18th-century Venice, Ascension. The Four Horsemen, the sequel to Ascension, came out in 2017.