The heron

'Exquisite. . . a classic tour de force' The New York Times 'It struggled to keep itself aloft, to gain height.

But then it suddenly gave up, and dropped as though it were breaking into many pieces'Early on a cold Sunday morning, forty-five-year-old Edgardo Limentani gets up to join a shooting party in the countryside surrounding the town of Ferrara.

As the day passes, he contemplates his past, his disappointments and how he has got here.

Like the birds he shoots, he realizes, he is trapped, broken, waiting alone for the final coup de grâce.

Then he sees a way out. The fifth book in Bassani's Novel of Ferrara sequence, and his final novel, The Heron is a taut, poignant portrait of a middle-aged man's reckoning with his life.