Celeste’s War
Autumn 1944. In the woods of the Langhe, twelve-year-old Celeste and his little sister Flora, five, are playing Training, a survival game to prepare for the arrival of the enemy – and the enemy, they have always been taught, are the rebels who have gone up into the hills: the partisans. But nothing can prepare them for what they find that day when they return home: the house burnt down, and their mother, like a fallen angel, lying in the yard with two holes in her chest. The old world is gone, and Celeste is left with only two things: protecting his little sister and avenging their mother’s death.
Thus begins the two siblings’ journey in search of her killers who, Celeste is certain, are among the partisans. But the reality he comes face to face with is not the one his mother had always told him about. And the war that tears Italy apart – and which sees men and women fighting for opposing ideas of world, country and freedom – will undermine all his certainties.
A story by Book on a Tree
By the same author or illustrator
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