Come Dio comanda

The novel is set in Varrano, an invented and heavily industrialised town in north-eastern Italy, where fields and woods alternate with warehouses, ring roads and shopping centres. It centres on Rino Zena and his thirteen-year-old son, Cristiano, whose mother left soon after he was born. Rino is thirty-six, a violent heavy drinker with neo-Nazi sympathies who lives by his wits, yet father and son are intensely attached to each other, and Rino lives in fear that a social worker will take the boy away. Their only friends are Danilo Aprea and Corrado Rumitz, known as Quattro Formaggi.