Candido

Candido, subtitled A Dream Dreamed in Sicily, follows a man who from birth cannot tolerate anything but the plain, undisguised truth. We meet him as a child, then as a teenager, and finally as an adult, and at every stage his inability to bend the truth draws him into trouble. He takes the world's big claims about faith, power and public life at face value, and insists that such matters are simple. Around him, however, lies is everywhere, and their results are plain to see in the Sicily he inhabits. This Sicily is an imagined place, yet it feels no less real for being a dream. The novel shows untruth taking many forms, each carrying a heavy load of injustice and suffering. Only innocence, the book suggests, has any chance of standing against it.

Leonardo Sciascia (1921-1989) was a Sicilian writer known for novels that examine corruption, power and the workings of the Mafia in his home island. Candido draws on Voltaire's Candide, and its satire of a naive optimist moving through a corrupt world gives the book its comic edge alongside its seriousness.