The Fourth Shore: the sliver of fertile land along the Tripoli coast, the 'lost' territory Mussolini promised to reclaim for Italy. Which is how, in 1929, seventeen-year-old Liliana Cattaneo arrives there from Rome on a ship filled with eager colonists to join her brother and his new wife. Liliana is sure she was on the brink of a great adventure, but what awaits her is not the Mediterranean idyll of cocktail parties, smart dances, dashing officers and romantic intrigues she had imagined. Instead she finds a world of persecution, violence, repression, corruption and deceptions both great...

Virginia Baily's new novel, her follow-up to the internationally bestselling Early One Morning, is a sweeping, absorbing novel by one of the most gifted, humane and perceptive storytellers at work today.