Swallows of Monte Cassino

The Strega Prize-winning author of The Girl with a Leica delivers a novel that hinges on one of the bloodiest World War II battles and those who fought it. In this highly original novel, Janeczek retells the four-month-long Battle of Monte Cassino from the point of view of the Maori, Gurkha, Polish, North African, small-town American and other Allied foot soldiers who fought and died under German fire near that 6th century Benedictine abbey. Twined through the battle is another story, a memory of the drowned and the saved in Janeczek's own family in wartime Eastern Europe, where Jews who did not go to Nazi death camps went to Soviet gulag camps, and sometimes survived, and even went on to fight at Monte Cassino. A powerful reflection on all the ways that rights can be taken from us. 'Helena Janeczek's novel is this: a tattoo etched on the skin, and not painlessly. A vast design that brings together threads from all the various lives that converged in that legendary battle. The beauty of her tale lies in its structure, the way opposites converge: the chaos of battle and the silence of the defeated, ordinariness and the heroism of the powerless, carefully guarded memory and impetuous youth, the past perpetually intertwined with the present.' -Roberto Saviano, author of Gomorrah