Publisher: Atria Books, March 8, 2022

Format: ebook

Pages: 320

Rating: 4/5 stars

Synopsis (from Goodreads):

The author of the “unforgettable story of strength, love, and survival” (Jillian Cantor, USA TODAY bestselling author) The Light After the War returns with a sweeping and evocative story of love and purpose in WWII Italy.

Rome, 1943: University student Marina Tozzi is on her way home when she finds out that her father has been killed for harboring a Jewish artist in their home. Fearful of the consequences, Marina flees to Villa I Tatti, the Florence villa of her father’s American friend Bernard Berenson and his partner Belle da Costa Greene, the famed librarian who once curated J.P. Morgan’s library.

Florence is a hotbed of activity as partisans and Germans fight for control of the city. Marina, an art expert, begins helping Bernard catalog his library as he makes the difficult trek to neutral Switzerland, helping to hide precious cultural artifacts from the Germans. Adding to the tension, their young neighbor Carlos, a partisan, seeks out Marina for both her art expertise and her charm. Marina, swept up in the romance, dreams of a life together after the war.

But when Carlos disappears, all of Marina’s assumptions about her life in Florence are thrown into doubt, and she’ll have to travel halfway around the world to unravel what really happened during the war.

My Reviews:

Thanks Atria Books for the copy of this book.
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Read if you like: WW2 fiction
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Marina returns home in Rome to find her father killed for hiding a Jewish person. She flees to her fathers friends villa in Tuscany where she hopes she can lay low and stay safe. But there she gets wrapped up in the world of preserving art from the Nazis and the resistance movement.
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I enjoyed reading about Marina’s experience in the art world and her work with the resistance. I also liked reading about Italy under occupation of the Germans. The relationship between Marina and Carlos definitely kept me hooked throughout the book, and even with the end of the war, the story doesn’t end and there’s even more drama, which I wasn’t expecting!
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CW: war, torture, death, betrayal, pregnancy, and anti-Semitism.