ABOUT
THE BOOK

This delicately balanced and enthralling novel has at its heart a wartime tragedy that half a century later claims new victims and scapegoats. Daphne is seventy-four, clever, humorous and tenaciously independent. In 1940, she was young and hopeful and worked in a junior role at the War Office. In the chaos and confusion of wartime London she finds herself interviewing some of the hundreds of Italian émigrés who have been rounded up in dawn raids – and has to decide their politics, and their fates. Her ruthless efficiency under pressure, her sense of duty – and her impeccable ‘list’ – have terrible consequences that come back to plague her.

A lifetime later, her adored but elusive younger son, Oliver, is a TV journalist, covering a very different war in a southern republic of the former USSR. His girlfriend, Rachel, working at the tabloid end of television, meanwhile uncovers a story about a little known incident in Britain’s war history – and what’s more, she’s unearthed an Italian survivor.

Francine Stock’s poised and impressive first novel shifts easily between past and present, between war at home and conflict in faraway places. A moving story about families and responsibility, it vividly explores how we edit life, and how even the slightest actions can reverberate, from then to now, from public to private worlds. The past, like a Soviet republic, is definitely a foreign country.