Ida was thirteen when, at 6.16 a.m. one morning, her adored and adoring father rose out of bed at their home in Messina, Sicily, and simply disappeared for good. Now, twenty-three years later, Ida is married, living with her husband in Rome, writing radio plays for a popular weekly broadcast. Her mother calls her home, and a mundane visit becomes a reckoning.
And extraordinary novel about life after the ultimate betrayal - the abandonment of a thirteen-year-old daughter and her still young mother by their father and husband - Farewell, Ghosts manages to plumb the depths of that betrayal and to walk the razor's edge in describing the daughter's life after it. Both a coming-of-age story and a tragedy, exquisitely translated by the incomparable Ann Goldstein.