And then one day, it hit me, that viscous glue the Faculty termed administrative anxiety.

The action takes place in the not-too-distant future, maybe 2030, maybe 2040. Dismissed from his post in Security as Captain in Charge of Writing and Ideology in the Study Department, Jimmy Durante had lost everything, and couldn’t think of anywhere else to go but the Peninsula, that vast perimeter of exclusion where the Nuclear Accident had taken place 15 years before. Everything there was still radioactive: the homes, the flora and fauna, the fish and the fowl. People who sought refuge there were a lot more likely to get thyroid cancer and skin cancer, but many survived. On the coast, in the Seagull Hotel, where he has found not just shelter but even protection, Durante’s life isn’t half bad, even if he is constantly screening himself for the first signs of sickness. Then he meets Valentina Ordjonikidze, a former cellist who landed in the Peninsula a year and a half before him, but who seems totally unaffected by the radioactivity. What was such an extraordinary woman doing at the Seagull? Jimmy Durante will be caught up in dangerous escapades in her company and will get to know a fascinating woman with a murky past.

An unforgettable voyage to the heart of a society’s exclusion zone, The Peninsula portrays the encounter between two people in a place where death is constantly on the prowl. The story of an impossible quest for a lost world.