A work of understated elegance and cumulative power, this novel eases readers into a drama unfolding within a Catholic family in Italy on the eve of World War II. As scenes only dimly understood by the child Lorenza are revisited by the woman she becomes, what seemed a family affair-a romance involving Lorenza's mother, her father's Jewish friend Arturo, and her aunt Margot in Switzerland-begins to reveal the broader outlines of the drama of history, in particular the tragedy of Italy's Jews during the Holocaust. Limning the interplay of past and present, of memory and presence, this haunting...

A rediscovered Italian masterpiece chronicling the author's experience as an infantryman, newly translated and reissued to commemorate the centennial of World War I. Taking its place alongside works by Ernst JYnger, Robert Graves, and Erich Maria Remarque, Emilio Lussu's memoir is one of the most affecting accounts to come out of the First World War. A classic in Italy but virtually unknown in the English-speaking world, it reveals, in spare and detached prose, the almost farcical side of the war as seen by a Sardinian officer fighting the Austrian army on the Asiago plateau in northeastern...

An award-winning writer travels the eastern front of Europe, where the push/pull between old empires and new possibilities has never been more evident. Paolo Rumiz traces the path that has twice cut Europe in two--first by the Iron Curtain and then by the artificial scaffolding of the EU--moving through vibrant cities and abandoned villages, some places still gloomy under the ghost of these imposing borders, some that have sought to erase all memory of it and jump with both feet into the West (if only the West would have them). In The Fault Line, he is a sublime and lively guide through these...