The Fire in the Mountain

A scholar of all things Italian, and especially Sicilian, with an eye for the quirky and the poetic, Attlee does for Etna what she did for lemons: she delves deep into the history of the volcano and the relationship of its people to their unpredictable land

Caroline Moorhead, The Spectator

Helena Attlee’s The Fire in the Mountain is a richly evocative journey – whether on the rattling circum-Etna railway, on foot through the music-filled streets of Catania at the height of the Saint Agatha festival, at the crater to gaze in awe at the nocturnal pyrotechnics, or in the café, to reward taste buds with iced delicacies once made from the volcano’s winter snows. Atlee makes a compelling case that all of this culture, flavour and spectacle flows – like the lava – from the volcano itself

Clive Oppenheimer

[Attlee has] profound feeling for the terrain … the tireless curiosity she shows in roaming across her mountain is matched by those many graces of style typical of her writing.

Jonathan Keates, Literary Review