Chocolate and Stone

In the late 1950s, with Austria still recovering from the war, two lonely people - a plucky girl of five named Cilli and a cold and menacing boy of twenty named Gusti - meet in the garden of Cilli's grandmother's house. An only child whose mother loses a baby in childbirth and is too paralyzed by grief to care for her, Cilli spends her summer days with her grandmother. Gusti, ridiculed in town as a halfwit bully, comes to wait while his mother cleans the grandmother's house. In real life, he will become famous as August Walla, one of Europe's leading Art Brut artists. In the garden he wants only to be left alone to draw and paint. But Cilli, turning loneliness into courage, is determined to make a friend of this hulking stranger. Will he succumb to the magical stories she tells, the wonders she perceives, her occasional gifts of chocolate? Will he share the world of colors in which he lives, painting sticks, baking tins, trees, stones, every surface that presents itself? Will they overcome the barrier of loneliness they share?

Edi Goller's first novel, based on a true story, puts us in touch with our childhood. Her message of tolerance, and the triumph of diversity among all people, is more timely and urgent than ever. We are all Cilli. We are all Gusti.