February 1944. Six months since German forces occupied Rome. Five weeks since Allied fighters landed at Anzio, fifty kilometres south. Their advance is meeting ferocious resistance. Working inside the beleaguered city, the Contessa Giovanna Landini is part of the band of Escape Line activists known as ''The Choir''. Their mission is to hide refugees and to help Allied soldiers escape from Rome, where things grow darker every day under the rule of Gestapo boss Paul Hauptmann. One night, hurrying through the perilous streets in disguise, the Contessa comes across a man lying unconscious, dangerously injured. Taking him to safety, she finds he has no papers. Is he a partisan, an escaped prisoner of war, a double-agent, a deserter, a German? While he hovers between life and death, hidden in an Escape Line secret safehouse, the truth of his identity could mean the end for them all.

Autorentext

Joseph O'Connor's fiction has been published in forty languages. His twenty books include eleven novels, among them the million-selling Star of the Sea, Ghost Light, Shadowplay and My Father's House, a Washington Post Book of the Year. His work has been shortlisted for the LA Times Book Award, twice for the Whitbread/Costa and twice for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction and has won the Nielsen Bookscan Golden Book Award, France's Prix Millepages, Italy's Premio Acerbi and Premio Napoli, an American Library Association Award, the American Ireland Fund Literary Award, the Hennessy Writer of the Year and Hall of Fame Awards, the Eason/An Post Novel of the Year Award, a Cullman Fellowship at the New York Public Library, the Irish Pen Award for Outstanding Achievement and the Prix Madeleine Zepter for European Novel of the Year. He is Frank McCourt Chair of Creative Writing at the University of Limerick.

**www.josephoconnorauthor.com**

Klappentext

**WINNER OF IRISH BOOK OF THE YEAR 2025

'As thrilling, beautiful and sensational a novel as you'll read this year or any year' Sunday Times

February 1944. Six months since Nazi forces occupied Rome.**

Inside the war-torn city, the Contessa Giovanna Landini works for the band of Escape Line activists known as 'the Choir'. Her mission is to smuggle Allied soldiers to safety, all under the nose of Gestapo boss Paul Hauptmann.

During a ferocious morning air raid a mysterious parachutist lands in Rome and disappears into the backstreets. Is he an ally or an imposter? His fate will come to put the whole Escape Line at risk.

Meanwhile, Hauptmann's attention has landed on the Contessa. As his fascination grows, she is pulled into a dangerous game with him - one where the consequences could be lethal.

'A superb testament to humankind's bravery and resilience...moving and immersive' Guardian, Books of the Year

'Tremendous and terrifying' Fintan O'Toole, Irish Times Books of the Year

**'A stellar piece of storytelling' Daily Mail

'Not just a wartime thriller, but a meditation on how we remember, how we resist and how, even in the darkest times, humanity endures' New York Times**