Corrado is a professor who leaves the dark and bombed-out Turin every evening to seek refuge in the surrounding hills. But when war penetrates even there, he decides to retreat to other, even more distant hills, those of his youth. On his way, he encounters gunfire, deaths, and human blood mingling with the gasoline from leaking trucks. Innocence is lost forever, and even the ground of his origins can offer no solace, because nothing is the same anymore. This work represents the pinnacle of Cesare Pavese's writing, the story of individual loneliness in the face of civic and historical engagement; egoism is overcome by the discovery that each fallen resembles those left behind, and calls them to account. This novel is the symbol of political engagement and the existential discomfort of an entire generation.