The setting of this novel is poverty-stricken southern Italy under Mussolini's fascist regime -- but it could easily be any time, anywhere that the helpless and dispossessed see their very existence threatened by the powers that rule and own the earth. Ignazio Silone's searingly compassionate vision of the human condition gives a fable-like quality to this story of peasants searching for a way to stop the legal theft of their vital source of water...