One morning, high in the Dolomite mountains, two hikers are some distance apart. The path in places is narrow and perilous. One man falls to his death. The other sounds the alarm. But these men are not strangers. Members of the same revolutionary group forty years earlier, the first had betrayed the second, who must now hold his own against a young magistrate intent upon having him tried for murder.

Was their meeting an improbable encounter, or an impossible coincidence?

Impossible is a brilliant hymn to the lure of the mountains, an engrossing illumination of political brotherhood, and also the subtlest of detective stories.

"If there's an entry point into the work of the enduring, award-winning Italian writer Erri De Luca, then N.S. Thompson's excellent translation is surely it . . . Thoughtful and wise about life and landscape, it's the most cerebral of whodunnits" - Observer

"A unique and remarkable novel" - La Croix

"The only true first-rate writer that the new millennium has given us so far" - Corriere della Sera