The book takes place on farms and in small villages in the Piedmontese region between Genoa and Turin. The present day of the book is a few years after the end of World War II, but much of the story is set in the past – when the narrator, who is 40 in the present, was a boy and a young man. In the early years of Fascism in Italy, the narrator left for America, where he traveled west to California and made a small fortune making liquor and wine before being interned during the war. We only get bits and pieces of the narrator's time in the U.S. – he's more interested in telling us about his childhood. He was a bastard taken in by a poor family of tenant farmers who wanted the monthly stipend given in return for his care. When that family moved on, he was given room and board in return for light labor on the estate of a wealthy family in the village. He spent his teenage years working for that family and the central story revolves around them: the three daughters, their suitors, the other workers in the household. It's unclear to the reader why the narrator has returned to this village after the war. It seems to be unclear to himself, and to his childhood friend, Nuto, with whom he reunites as well. You sense that he's trying to recapture that time before, but he has become different now from leaving. And the ones who stayed have become different too, from staying – through the war, the Fascist regime, the Partisan resistance, the German occupation.
Unlike his narrator in The Moon and the Bonfires, Pavese did stay in Italy through the Mussolini era. He was an anti-fascist who, like Carlo Levi and Natalia Ginzburg, was arrested and sent to a village in the south of Italy (Calabria in Pavese's case) for a year of confinement. After his release he worked as an editor for a leftist newspaper and as a translator of English books. It felt strange to be reading this book at the moment when a neo-Fascist regime seems about to take hold in Italy.
