"This year's Drue Heinz Literature Prize winner, In the Gathering Woods, contains a cast of characters with the same Italian ancestry, but whose stories come at us unbounded by time and space. The book opens early in the twentieth century, with a narrator's boyhood recollections of gathering mushrooms with his grandfather - a narrator who seems still haunted by a terrifying local legend that tormented him as a boy. We skip backward to a young shepherd-artist in the Apennine mountains in the 1500s, who yearns to be discovered, as Giotto was. Later, a preverbal baby accumulates bits of the conversation carried on by adults at the table above her head; a teenager struggles to learn Latin; a neurologist from Chicago returns to the Apennines to deposit shards of glass at a grave."--BOOK JACKET.