From London to Africa to discover yourself

London, 1882. Clay is 15 years old, he grew up on the banks of the Thames and makes a living digging along the river banks to find goods to resell. Despite his young age, he has already lived intense experiences and formed important relationships, which is why he is reluctant to leave the past behind him. The most important bond is with old Sal, who at a certain point, as if to encourage him to get involved, disappears leaving Clay an envelope with his own story. A story that also begins in London, more than forty years earlier, in 1839. Young Salton is the scion of a noble and respected family, surrounded by luxury and comfort. Together with his cousin Oscar, to whom he is very close even though he does not share his arrogance and cynicism, he sets off on an adventurous journey to Africa that will change his perception of himself, of others and of the world. A journey thanks to which Salton will forever leave the place to Sal

Five years after the great success of the novel Nebbia (Strega Ragazzi e Ragazze Prize in 2020), Marta Palazzesi returns to using history as a lens to illuminate and explain the present. She does so thanks to her latest, compelling work Sal, dal deserto al fiume (Il Castoro, 2024, pp. 176) in which the narrative horizon is represented by a distant and still unknown Africa in the mid-19th century , a place of inevitable encounter and clash with the different. At the center of the story is the adolescence of Sal, a character that readers have known and loved as an adult in Nebbia and who here we find young, ready to intertwine his existence with none other than an African leopard.

We asked Marta Palazzesi how she came up with the choice to write a novel that is both a sequel and a prequel to one of her previous works:

"The novel was born from my desire to explore the relationship between Clay, the young protagonist that readers met in Nebbia, and Old Sal, his mentor and adoptive father. This character has always aroused great curiosity not only in Nebbia readers, but also in myself, so much so that I felt the need to investigate his past in depth. Sal, therefore, can be considered an ideal sequel to Nebbia, but the two novels can also be read independently."

How would you define Clay?

"Clay is a fifteen-year-old boy who grew up in London in abject poverty; he is brave and loyal, but he is afraid of entering the adult world and leaving behind everything he has known up to that moment."

And Sal, what character is he?

"Old Sal is a man with a complex and unexpected history, which Clay and the reader discover in this novel. Sal's past, in some ways, mirrors Clay's present, and reading his adoptive father's memoirs will be useful to the boy. In Fog readers met Old Sal as a mudlark, a man who lives on the banks of the Thames, selling and bartering objects he finds in the mud; in this novel they will find a completely different adolescent Sal and together they will travel to southern Africa at the time of colonialism, coming into contact with the complex reality of the Cape Colony and the relationships between the Crown and the Afrikaners."

What do the two young people have in common and what divides them?

"Both, the Clay of the present of the novel and the Sal of the past, find themselves at a crossroads and both, at least initially, struggle to make a choice. What divides them is certainly the way they grew up."

What will come of their meeting?

"Sal and Clay's meeting is a sort of 'closure' for the former and the beginning of a new life for the latter. Despite their profoundly different ages and backgrounds, their path is intertwined."