From the Sunday Times-bestselling author of Village of Secrets, comes the extraordinary story of four courageous women who helped form the Italian Resistance during WW2
Caroline Moorehead is the biographer of Bertrand Russell, Freya Stark, Iris Origo and Martha Gellhorn. Her book on the French Resistance, Village of Secrets, was a Sunday Times bestseller and was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize in 2014. Her most recent book, A Bold and Dangerous Family, was shortlisted for the Costa Biography Award. She lives in London.
Moorehead paints a wonderfully vivid and moving portrait of the
women of the Italian Resistance…an excellent book… She depicts a
tragic fate that is timeless, of dreams forged in adversity,
shattered by collisions with practical politics
*Sunday Times*
Brilliantly and subtly told… The narrative is told with such verve
that I frequently had goosebumps: the men and women known from much
drier history books come alive… a riveting read
*Guardian*
A sensitive and perceptive book founded on an appreciation of the
role women play in any society, at any times. It is sober and
serious, but still an easy read… Moorehead is not afraid to show
how these women used their femininity to become more effective
partisans
*The Times*
The moving finale of a quartet of books on resistance to fascism...
Moorehead conveys the terror with understated power; she is equally
good at conjuring the blurred morality of civil conflict...[and]
the valleys and wild flowers in technicolour detail
*Economist*
In the best book she has so far written, Moorehead corrects this
imbalance with a narrative whose coherence perfectly matches its
author’s admiration for her subjects’ redemptive idealism…
Moorehead needs to be read by Italians themselves. Over here,
meanwhile, she deserves every prize going
*Literary Review*
This brilliant book restores women to the heart of the Italian
resistance story, making clear that they performed all the same
activities as the men, while facing precisely the same dangers…
This, at last, is their powerful story
*Spectator*
ambitious... a comprehensive, lucid and thoughtful account of a
complicated conflict.
*TLS*
Moorehead’s quartet of heroines all… left the diaries, the letters,
the documents and the family memories that have allowed her to tell
their eye-opening and spirit-lifting stories so powerfully
*The Arts Desk*
A brilliant overview of the war in Italy from the perspective of
the female partisans
*Spectator, *Books of 2019**
Moorehead skilfully weaves…threads of individual stories together
to create a web of interconnected lives… broad narrative is dotted
with flashes of detail; the colour of a piece of clothing, the
wording of a letter… Moorehead captures a sense of hope and
vitality among the women of the Resistance, fighting with courage
and determination for a future they believed in
*Scotland on Sunday*
Moorehead … takes up the story of four friends in Turin who decided
passive resistance was no longer enough [against Mussolini’s reign]
and joined a growing partisan movement based in the remote valleys
of Piedmont. This is a bittersweet tale, not of betrayal, exactly,
but of subtle excision from the script
*The Tablet*
A House in the Mountains is a page-turner… This book is to be
welcomed as a highly readable story in its own right, and as an
accessible introduction to the role of women in the Resistenza
*BBC History*
A deeply-researched, fast-paced account of the Italian Resistance,
a story not widely known to the general reader
*History of War*
This is a highly satisfying conclusion to the author's series.
Excellent, well-presented evidence of the incalculable strengths
and abilities of women to create and run a country
*Kirkus*
[A] moving finale of a quartet of books on resistance to
fascism
*Economist*
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