FOURTH SHORE

1929, Tripoli, and Liliana is sure she is on the brink of a great adventure. What awaits her is not the Mediterranean idyll of cocktail parties, dashing officers and romantic intrigues she had imagined. Instead she finds a world of persecution, repression, corruption and deceptions both great and small. Blown about by the winds of fascism and Catholicism, Liliana becomes enmeshed in a dark liaison which has terrible consequences both for her and those she loves most. The Fourth Shore is the sliver of fertile land along the Tripoli coast, the 'lost' territory Mussolini promised to reclaim for Italy, which is how 17 year old Liliana arrives there from Rome to join her brother and his new wife on a ship filled with eager colonists. We journey from the sand storms of Tripoli to a North London suburb where, as plain Lily Jones, she begins to uncover a secret she has buried so deeply that even she is far from certain what it is. A real treat, this is a beautifully written account of the long consequences of war set in a richly evoked Rome of the 1970s. 372pp, paperback.