The Duke

Outside Vallorgana, a tiny, isolated village high in the foothills of the Dolomites, the ‘Duke’ lives in the villa of his aristocratic ancestors. The last in the centuries’ old line of the Cimamontes, he spends his days on his land and absorbed in the family archive, tolerated, if gently ridiculed by the villagers who are his neighbours. When he finds out that the village big man is taking timber from his land, he has a decision to make. Will he stay in his glorious, cerebral isolation or will he honour his ancestral blood and take action against this affront?

Matteo Melchiorre’s portrait of the idiosyncratic character of the Duke and the world of Valorgana is a sweeping feat of literary imagination. With the pace, panorama and plot twists of a great nineteenth-century classic, the breathless story of the Duke’s ensuing feud unfolds, asking some big twenty-first century questions about our relationships with privilege, the past, the natural world and each other.

With The Duke, Matteo Melchiorre has crafted a taut, epic tale about the madness of power, the laws of nature and individual freedom.

This remarkable book makes us believe that some of the reasons why we still plough our way through novels might still be alive: the thirst for adventure, the chill of the mountains, a sense of greatness slightly beyond our reach.

Matteo Melchiorre was born in 1981. After working as a researcher at the University of Udine, Ca’ Foscari University, and the IUAV University of Venice, he has been the director of the Library of the Museum and Historical Archive of Castelfranco Veneto since 2018. His work focuses on the economic and social history of the Middle Ages and the early modern period, as well as the history of mountains and forests. The Duke is his first novel.

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead meets The Leopard.

It’s a story set in the present, yes—but a present heavy with the weight of centuries. It has been a long time since I’ve read such a powerful novel, a novel that seeks to re-enchant the world.

This strange language takes hold of you - like a forest growing around you - and you don’t even notice.