Why a Booktrail?
1943 – The occupied city where one woman’s split second decision will change the lives of many.
Early One Morning
What you need to know before your trail
Rome 1943
Chiara Ravello, 27, is about to flee the occupied city to safety. The city as she once knew it, her city is no longer safe and she has the chance to live away from this place in the remote hills. As she is leaving, she makes eye contact with a woman who has been herded onto a truck with her family to be driven off into the unknown.
Chiara shouts, claiming this woman’s son as her own nephew and she demands his return. Then the truck departs and Chiara is left to face the reality of what she has done.
More than 30 years later, Chiara is living as a translator in Rome and the shadow of Daniele, the boy from the truck haunts her every move. One day she receives a phone call from a girl claiming to be Daniele’s daughter and only then is she forced to face up to the past and what she did all those years ago.
Travel Guide
Rome and the heartbreak of war which splits families and love across the decades.
War time Italy is a dark place to be. Chiara at the novel opens is suffering from its effects as her fiance has been taken from her and with her mother dead during the bombings which devastated the city, she is now living with her sister Cecilia. Life is hard in this ghetto like place and Chiara has to help care for her sister who is ill.
People are being taken from their families, ripped from their families every day and so when Chiara sees a young boy about to suffer the same fate as her fiance, she reacts by taking him, rescuing him for he is Jewish and will certainly be taken to one of the concentration camps she has heard of.
This desperate war time act will have severe repercussions throughout the years. As they leave the city and move to the countryside, life is no less troublesome. Avoiding Nazi attention is tough and dealing with the difficult relationship between her sister and their new ‘brother’ is very hard. Daniele is too young to know of how he has been saved – to him he has been torn from his mother and becomes troubled and confused.
This is the true face of wartime Rome – split moment decisions which transform lives, sometimes for the better, often for the worst. As Daniele grows, he is going to find out more and more about his past, who he is and what he might become. Anger and resentment bubble at the surface.
Many years later and the story of what happened to Daniel, the boy with the birthmark in the shape of a horseshoe which should mean that he would always have luck on his side, comes out. Maria, now living in Wales comes to Rome to find Chiara
Ww2 and the horrors of the Holocaust are only part of this story for what happens to those saved? These settings and horrific events lie on the borders of this novel for it’s what happens within people themselves, those who live on in their daily lives which reveal the real scars.
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