The Confines of the Shadow maps the transformation of the Libyan city of Benghazi from a sleepy Ottoman backwater in the 1910s to the second capital of an oil-rich kingdom in the 1960s. The short stories which comprise the second volume, The Fourth Shore, are set in the inter-war period, between the late 1920s, when Italy began solidifying its power in its new Libyan colony, and the end of World War II, when control of the country passed into British hands. Italian military officers idle their time away at their club or by exploring the strange lands where they have been posted, always at odds between the nationalistic education they received at home and the lessons they've learned during their time in Libya.
Employing a cosmopolitan array of characters, ranging from Italian officers to Ottoman functionaries, Spina chronicles Italy's colonial experience from the euphoria of conquest--giving the reader a front row seat to the rise and subsequent fall of Fascism in the aftermath of World War II--to the country's independence in the 1950s. Spina continues his narrative with the discovery of Libya's vast oil and gas reserves, which triggered the tumultuous changes that led to Muammar Gaddafi's forty-two year dictatorship.
Distinguished by an intimate understanding of East and West, this work and its companion volumes comprise among the most significant achievements of twentieth-century fiction and stand unchallenged as the only multigenerational epic about the European experience in North Africa.