This summer I was lucky because I got to read really beautiful books. A startling one I would like to suggest if you don’t know it yet is The City of Your Final Destination, written by Peter Cameron in 2002.

Omar Razaghi is an Iranian born graduate student who is granted by the University of Kansas to write an authorized biography of Jules Gund, a Latin American who committed suicide. But Gund’s heirs deny him their permission. So Omar decides to fly to Uruguay and reach a tiny and outlying village to meet Gund’s strange family, including his widow, his mistress and his brother, to convince them to allow him to write the book. His unannounced arrival will upset the fragile balance of the family and will make a deep change in the life of every character.

I remember that I had watched the movie based on this novel, with Charlotte Gainsbourg, an actress I really appreciate, playing one of the leading roles. But I have few memories of the movie.

The book, instead, captured me at once. It’s that a book, you read it at your own pace, you can stop and think about whenever you wish, in this way you appreciate it more. And this is what I did with this novel, even if I read it all at once, because I didn’t want to stop being inside the decaying atmosphere of the mansion of Ochos Rios. And I was fascinated by Cameron’s extraordinary capacity of conveying, through his witty dialogue, the subtle details of the relationships among the characters.