Summary

In Chapter 1, “He Killed him with a Motorbike Headlamp (What he had in his Hand)”, Valera – a soldier in the Italian army fighting in World War One – witnessed a fellow soldier, Copertini, die. Valera stopped riding his own motorbike in order remove the headlamp from Copertini’s motorcycle, because Valera wanted it for himself. While doing this, Valera was discovered by a lone German soldier. Valera pounced on the German and killed him using the headlamp.

In Chapter 2, “Spiritual America”, a young woman in her twenties whom the reader will only ever know as “Reno”, the name of her hometown, recalled her time driving a motorbike across Nevada in the 1970s. Reno didn’t know her father when she was growing up and was mainly raised by her uncle Bobby, a trucker, alongside her cousins Scott and Andy.

Reno lived in New York and...