The Last Translator

He was a postman for forty-one years. Now he is the only man alive who can read the village's mail.

In a white village in the heel of Italy, an old language is dying. Griko - the Greek that stayed behind when the ships left, two thousand years ago - has one word for the sea and fourteen for the wind, and Tullio Greco is the last man who speaks it.

So they come to his kitchen with envelopes. Letters found under false bottoms, inside hymnals, mortared into walls. Letters the dead wrote in the one language the priest, the police, and the schoolmaster could never read.

The families sit down with their hands folded, waiting for poetry.

What Tullio finds instead is a century of appointments behind walls, recipes that are timetables, blessings indistinguishable from curses, and the discovery that the village's sainted grandparents ran a second, warmer world in the language nobody was allowed to quote.

He reads the letters. Then he decides what they say.

When Brussels arrives with three million euros to preserve the language - and offers Tullio the post of official translator, sole authority, answerable to no one - the last speaker of a dead tongue becomes the most dangerous man in the province: the one who gets to decide what the dead confessed.

A novel about mercy, forgery, and the terrible intimacy of being the last person who understands.

From the author of The Older Night and The Painter of Clouds.