The Liberation

Sorrento Secrets

Kate Furnivall specialises in historical fiction, and her latest, The Liberation takes the reader to war-torn Italy. The time is 1945, the fag end of the second world war, when Italy is just getting out of the brutal Nazi occupation, but the people are also being battered by the Fascists and the Partisans, while the Allied forces try to bring order to a crime-ridden, starving population.

The courageous heroine of the book is Caterina Lombardi, a young woman who lives in Sorrento with her blind grandfather and younger brother Luca. Her mother had abandoned them for a more exciting life in Rome and her father was killed in an air raid. Now Caterina carries on her father’s trade, making delicate inlaid wooden decorative pieces, which she sells to support her family.

While trying to sell her wares in Naples, she is almost mugged by a bunch of ragged, feral kids, who fend for  themselves in the devastated country—and is rescued by two Allied military officers, one American and the other British.

When the gruff Major Jake Parr lands up at her doorstep to question her about her father’s work, she discovers that he belongs to a division that is tracking down and returning stolen art and artefacts, and that her father is suspected of having been part of a gang of traitors and looters of the country’s art heritage.
 
She cannot believe that her gentle and hard-working father could be guilty of such a crime, but when she is attacked twice and almost killed by gangsters, she knows she has to get to the bottom of the mystery, that involves a priceless jewelled table commissioned to her father. When her long-lost mother turns up, the knots get even more tangled. At the age of just twenty-one, Caterina is fearless and goes about hunting for pieces of the jigsaw, from the forbidding mansion of a count, to the innards of the crime scene in Naples.  She is befriended by the count’s daughter, kidnapped by the street kids and falls in love with the brooding Jake Parr. The romance, however, is given little attention in the book, there is so much else to focus on.

Furnivall’s descriptions of the time and place, and of course the intricately plotted story make The Liberation a worthwhile read. A love for history and research are the bedrock of this kind of fiction and in the box below, Furnivall reveals a part of the process.


The Liberation By Kate Furnivall
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Pages: 560