The Tuscan Secret
As World War Two shatters Europe, Ines is a young girl caught up in the Italian Resistance. With her brother and best friend sacrificing everything to fight the Nazis, Ines hides deep in the Tuscan mountains, tending the wounds of the fallen fighters – including an escaped British prisoner-of-war who captures her heart.
Forty-five years later, an elderly lady in an English nursing home passes away, dreaming of Italy in her dying hours. To her youngest daughter Anna, she leaves a battered box of letters, their pages yellowed with age, and a promise that the truth about what really happened to her in the war lies within.
Anna’s English father forbade her from learning her mother’s beautiful language. So to translate the handwritten diaries, she resolves to visit Tuscany for herself. As she explores the sun-kissed olive groves and stunning mountain landscapes of the homeland she’s never known, Anna uncovers a shocking secret about her mother’s past that will uproot everything she’s ever believed.
In this small Tuscan community, some wartime secrets were never meant to be uncovered…
Anna, the youngest of three siblings, is left £50,000 and her mother's diaries. Anna decides to use the money to travel to Italy and see the area in which her mother was brought up. She initially stays in a guest house owned by Teresa and where Anna meets Teresa's brother Francesco, who helps Anna translate her mother's diaries.
The narrative moves between the time of the diaries, 1944 towards the end of the second World War and 1999. For once this does work out well. Maybe some things in the diaries were more than we needed to know, but overall it gave a gruelling account of Italy living under German occupation and the horrors that went with it.
Parts of the narrative with Anna were a little bit clichéd, and didn't add to the story. The little bit we learnt about her siblings was pretty much irrelevant and almost felt as though it was added as an after thought.
While there is plenty of loss during the book, it all ends as expected.
Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for my ARC in exchange of an honest review.