A fiercely brave Italian woman convinces a German soldier to work with the Resistance in this unforgettable World War II love story.
Tuscany, 1940s. At 20 years old, Nada lives as the single mother of a toddler. Her husband has left to fight in Africa, her family is far away, and she knows almost no one in her new home, the seaside town of Marina di Carrara. Hermann, a 40-year-old Nazi soldier, has a family of his own back in Germany.
They meet by chance one winter afternoon on the Tuscan hills and fall in love. They decide to escape together: she from an oppressive family, and he from an army whose values he doesn't share. They join the Resistenza, full of hope and drunk with love, convinced that the future is on their side.
Giorgio van Straten skillfully retraces Nada and Hermann's stunning, cinematic history, full of twists and turns, which will leave readers questioning the power of emotion and its consequences: is love a force capable of overwhelming us, even making us risk our lives? Do the great dreams of youth impact our entire existence, or are they destined to become an inexhaustible source of nostalgia and frustration? Can the scars of such overwhelming experiences be hidden and forgotten?
Autorentext
Giorgio van Straten is the author of several novels, including the prize-winning My Name, A Living Memory. He has translated into Italian the works of authors such as Rudyard Kipling, Jack London, and Robert Louis Stevenson. From 2015 to 2019 he was the director of the Italian Cultural Institute in New York and is currently president of the Fondazione Alinari, one of the oldest and most important photographic archives in the world.
Jill Foulston is a writer and editor as well as a translator. She has translated works by Alba de Céspedes, Erri de Luca, Maddalena Vaglio Tanet, Piero Chiara, Marco Balzano, and Augusto De Angelis, and has twice been short-listed for the American Literary Translators Association's Italian Prose in Translation Award.