Sunflower Publishing Book Reviews

    Saving Madonna by Kate Bristow   SUMMARY: Inspired by real events, an unforgettable story of love, courage and sacrifice to save a country’s heritage. Italy 1943. As the Allies bomb Milan, Elena Marchetti reluctantly gives up her coveted job as an art curator in the city to return to her family farm near Urbino. She takes up a new role assisting Pasquale Rotondi, the Superintendent of Arts in the region, in protecting works of art from all over Italy that have been hidden in the relative safety of the countryside. At a family celebration, Elena reunites with Luca, a close childhood friend. A shattering event instigated by the occupying Germans deepens their relationship, and they start planning a life together. When rumours surface that Italy’s art is being stolen by the German occupiers, Pasquale hatches an audacious plan to rescue the priceless paintings in his possession. Elena and Luca are forced to make an impossible decision: will they embark on a ...

    The Girl Who Escaped By Angela Petch Description Italy, 1940. The girl sobs and rages as her father tells her the terrible news. “Italy is entering the war alongside Germany. Jews are to be arrested and sent to camps. We have to be ready.” As fascists march across the cobbled piazzas and past the towered buildings of her beloved home city, twenty-year-old  Devora ’s worst fears come true. Along with her Jewish parents and twin little brothers they are torn away from everything they love and sent to an internment camp huddled in the mountains. Her father promises this war will not last long… When they are offered a miraculous chance of escape by her childhood friend  Luigi , who risks everything to smuggle vital information into the camp, the family clambers under barbed wire and races for the border. But Devora is forced to make a devastating choice between saving a stranger’s life and joining her parents. As shots fire in the moonless night,  the family is ...

    Lest We Forget (Per Non Dimenticare) By Dr Allison Buck SUMMARY: Italy is full of idyllic hilltop towns teeming with centuries of history. Soriano nel Cimino, located in the Tuscia region of Lazio is one of those. On June 5, 1944, the day after Rome was liberated, this small town was nearly destroyed by Allied bombing. In 1994 for the 50th anniversary of the bombing, first-hand testimonies were collected and printed by some of the survivors and made available in Italian. This book contains those same testimonies of devastation, resilience, strength, and re-birth translated into English. It includes testimonies from fascists, antifascists, and partisans. Cold-blooded murder by the hands of the Nazis as they retreated to the north and scavenged to find enough wood and nails in the rubble to build the coffins to bury the almost 200 victims of the bombing. Soriano nel Cimino has now been rebuilt, but scars still run deep in the generations which followed. Every day the...

                                                              The Tuscan Secret By Angela Petch SUMMARY: ll Mulino. An old crumbling mill, by a winding river, nestled in the Tuscan mountains. An empty home that holds memories of homemade pasta and Nonna’s stories by the fire, and later: the Nazi invasion, and a family torn apart by a heartbreaking betrayal. Anna is distraught when her beloved mother, Ines, passes away. She inherits a box of papers, handwritten in Italian and yellowed with age, and a tantalizing promise that the truth about what happened during the war lies within.  The diaries lead Anna to the small village of Rofelle, where she slowly starts to heal as she explores sun-kissed olive groves, and pieces together her mother’s past: happy days spent herding sheep across Tuscan meadows cruelly interrupted ...

    Gran Sasso   By Gary Parkins SUMMARY: I n 1943, Mussolini is deposed and taken to a secret location. But in London, Winston Churchill is troubled. With Mussolini gone, there is nothing to stop Italy's Communists from forming a Bolshevik government in the north. It is an unbeatable nightmare scenario. The stakes could not be higher. If they lose Southern Europe to Stalin, the Allies would lose the war in Europe.  Churchill attempts a desperate gamble. The only thing that can head off the Communists' takeover is to put Mussolini back in power, but naturally, Churchill cannot be seen to arrange such a thing. Could Churchill's agents persuade Hitler's forces to rescue Mussolini without tipping their hand? Churchill sends in his top Italian SOE agent, Major George Huntington on a secret mission to Rome to spread the rumour that Churchill wants Mussolini found and put on trial in London for war crimes. Hitler is enraged and this news and sends his top SS Comma...