"A powerful, epic novel of four friends as they grapple with desire, youth, death, and faith in a sweeping story by the international bestselling author of The Solitude of Prime Numbers. Every year, after her school in Turin closes for the summer holidays, Teresa follows her father to his childhood home in Puglia and endures weeks of relentless heat and boredom. But everything changes the summer she meets the three boys who live on the farm next door: Nicola; Tommaso; and strange, charismatic Bern-whom Teresa will love for the rest of her life. Raised like brothers, they are almost legendary figures in the community. They don't go to school, but instead live in a kind of commune led by Cesare, a charismatic teacher and father figure who believes in God, reincarnation, and the earth. With him, they share a complex, intimate, and seemingly unassailable bond. But as Teresa will discover as she grows up, things are not always what they seem, and her idyllic summers filled with endless afternoons making love to Bern among the reeds must one day come to an end. No bond is unbreakable, and as each of the boys--now growing into men--struggles to find his place in the world and to identify something that is worth believing in, their friendship will be tested to the breaking point. An unforgettable story of enduring love, the bonds between men, and the all-too-human search for meaning, Heaven and Earth is Paolo Giordano at his best: an author capable of unveiling the depths of the human soul and who has now given us the old-fashioned pleasure of a big, sprawling novel in which to lose oneself"--