Here are the next two paragraphs of Davos, the first book in the Franco Fasiolo series, which recounts the adventures of its eponymous protagonist, who is a forensic botanist and reluctant cosmopolitan. I hope you enjoy them!
The road up out of the valley had an annoying grade, steep enough to make walking hard but not steep enough to make it exciting, just a long low incline that took the energy out of Franco's center without ever making itself known. They called it the Valley of Tears, which while unoriginal was not inaccurate, and therefore a description that Franco accommodated with a resigned complicity. His strides seemed tiny, as if he were merely lifting his feet and putting them down in almost the same place, hardly advancing at all against the road's invisible slope, like a mountaineer who had gone so high as to have immersed himself in a new register of gravity.
Finally he reached the border. The guard smirked at him with a handsome face when Franco told him where he was going. Davos? Long way away! Franco just stood and said nothing, like the donkey. What does the guard do? Sit in his silly car, or on his obnoxious motorcycle? How far has he ever walked? No more than a few hundred meters, if that. The guard handed Franco back his passport and smiled again with perfect facial hair. Funny how it just grew like that, not like Franco's beard, which was fuller and less angular. He looked like a lad of the Renaissance, not from around here, not like Franco, who was born and bred in the valley. Still, the guard was very likable and Franco was sad to go, adding him to his already long list of heartbreaks: the goat, the cow, the pig (remembered from another walk), the donkey, the slide, the smiling realtor, the fig tree.
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