Confines of the Shadow

In Lands Overseas is the first volume of Alessandro Spina's epic, The Confines of the Shadow, a sequence of novels and short stories that map the transformation of Libya, particularly the coastal city of Benghazi, under the pressure of Italian colonization. This volume is divided into three sections-The Young Maronite, The Marriage of Omar and The Nocturnal Visitor-which are set between 1912 and 1927. At its outset we find Italian soldiers solidifying their control over Libya's coasts, leaving Libyan rebels to withdraw to the desert and prepare for a war that would rage for over a decade. The readers is then led to explore the divided Libya of the 1920s, when an Italian governor ruled from Benghazi while Sidi Idris al-Senussi, the head of the Senussi dynasty and future Libyan king, governed from Ajdabiya. Voices from all sides bicker over whether to reconcile or fight, though many simply try to make space for whatever small pleasures life amidst political upheaval might allow. Employing a cosmopolitan array of characters, ranging from Ottoman functionaries, to Libyan aristocrats and Italian officers, Spina chronicles the colonial experience in Libya with breadth and feeling. Distinguished by an intimate understanding of East and West, this work and its companion volumes comprise among the most significant achievements of 20th century fiction and stand unchallenged as the only multi-generational epic about the European experience in North Africa.

The modern classic about the colonization of Libya continues, as Italy watches its prized colony slip away. The Confines of the Shadow maps the transformation of the Libyan city of Benghazi from a sleepy Ottoman backwater in the 1910s to the second capital of an oil-rich kingdom in the 1960s. The short stories that comprise this second volume are set in the period between the late 1920s, when Italy began solidifying its power in its new Libyan colony, and the end of World War II, when control of the country passed into British hands. Italian military officers idle their time away at their club or by exploring the strange lands where they have been posted, always at odds between the nationalistic education they received at home and the lessons they've learned during their time in Libya. Employing a cosmopolitan array of characters, ranging from Italian soldiers to Ottoman functionaries, The Fourth Shore (the term was Mussolini's name for the Mediterranean shore of Libya) chronicles Italy's colonial experience from the euphoria of conquest-giving the reader a front-row seat to the rise and subsequent fall of Fascism in the aftermath of World War II-to the country's independence in the 1950s. The discovery of Libya's vast oil and gas reserves will trigger the tumultuous changes that led to Muammar Gaddafi's forty-two-year dictatorship.