Glenn Haybittle

In 1937 Freddie (English), Isabella (Italian) and Oskar (a German Jew) become friends at an art school in Florence where they are taught by the dictatorial but magus-like Maestro and his sinister fascist assistant Fosco. When war arrives Freddie returns to England to become the pilot of a Lancaster bomber. Oskar, now a dancer, has moved to Paris where he escapes the 1942 roundup of Jews and arrives in Italy with his young daughter Esme. Isabella remains in Florence where she continues to paint. Until she is called upon by Maestro to forge an old master painting, apparently at the behest of the Fuhrer himself, and as a result is seen as a Nazi collaborator by her neighbours. The murderous skies over Germany and a war-torn Italy in the grip of Nazi occupation provide the setting for this novel about the love of a separated husband and his wife and the love of a man for his young daughter. Freddie and Oskar both hope to find their way back to Florence. But Florence's heritage of preserving the identity and continuity of the past has never before been so under threat."

The Way Back to Florence

"The last task of love is to protect remembrance." Venice 1938. Fausto's ambition is to be a film star. Meanwhile he works for the fascist secret police. Elisabetta is being taught how to paint using the techniques of the old masters by her father. And, to her horror, she is being courted by the head of the fascist secret police in Venice. Marcello works in his Jewish family's art supplies shop where he meets Elisabetta and becomes besotted by her. He moves about Venice in his beloved gondola. Three young people whose lives have barely begun when war breaks out and whose integrity and courage will be tested in very different ways when the Nazis arrive in Venice. A missing painting of Elisabetta's will come to hold the key of a pivotal mystery.

The War in Venice

Max and Ada, ten-year-old neighbours, are engrossed in composing a book of spells in a tree house in Paris when the Nazis arrive to occupy the city. Max, the child of a rape and abandoned by his mother, is in foster care; Ada is Jewish. Almost fifty years later Max, the black sheep of the family, summons his grandson to tell him the story of those years in Paris and reveal a guilty secret that has eaten away at him. His mind is now set on digging up the past and he wants Mark to accompany him across the English Channel. His dying wish is to shed light on the two missing women in his life: Ada and his mother. Mark though is struggling with his own existential crisis. There is a missing woman in his life too. A deftly accomplished tightrope act of pathos and humour, The Tree House is a bewitching novel of loss and restitution, heritage and the hereafter.

The Tree House

During the Battle of Britain Evie Devereux is an RT operator in the control tower of a Fighter Command airfield. Here she commences an affair with a Spitfire pilot, Jack Cave. Jack, ashamed of his father who was shot as a coward in France during world war 1 and of his working class background, has invented a new identity for himself as Guy Wentworth. In 1943 Evie joins the SOE. Like Jack, she too now has a false identity. Reports that the Gestapo have infiltrated entire SOE circuits in France have been ignored by London HQ. On the night of her departure she finds a note in her pocket warning her not to trust the man she is travelling with. Evie & Jack is a riveting novel of suspense, deception and love which brings vividly to life the experiences of a Spitfire pilot and an undercover secret agent working in the Gestapo-infested atmosphere of occupied France.

Evie and Jack

2084: In a post-apocalyptic world controlled by UniCorp, where the memory of the "genetically inferior" has been chemically tampered with, Alowa escapes her captivity as a dispenser. She is sheltered in the reservation where dangers abound and her fears grow that she might be an "immigrant" - a bioengineered facsimile of a human being. She is told a boy called Solstice has her memories and she will have to enter History to find him. 1943: Max's family have been deported from England to Italy when Mussolini declares war on Great Britain. Max has Italian lessons with a Jewish woman and falls in love with her daughter. Then the Nazis arrive in the sleepy fishing village. 1890: Weayaya, living on the Standing Rock reservation, dances the ghost dance. Then Sitting Bull is killed and she and her young son are among the Lakota fleeing towards Wounded Knee. The Memory Tree: four interlocking narratives which forge a thrilling path through time and heritage.

The Memory Tree

Ala Silberman is training to be a dancer when the Germans invade Warsaw. Together with almost half a million other Jews, Ala and her family are forced into the ghetto, where she struggles with feelings of guilt at her comparative privileged circumstances. Then Ala's enigmatic teacher forms a dance company with the intention of putting on a performance for the ghetto's residents. Max Silberman, Ala's uncle, is a bachelor, who still carries the flame for the girl he knew at university. She married someone else and he hasn't seen her for over a decade. When he meets her in the ghetto and discovers she and her two children have been abandoned by her Catholic husband all his dormant hopes are incongruously revived amidst the squalor and destitution surrounding him. In the Warsaw Ghetto tells the deeply moving story of Ala and Max's struggle to preserve their aspirations in the midst of the inhumane conditions of the Warsaw ghetto, until the deportations to the death camps begin and the Jews organise themselves into a fighting force determined to oppose the Nazis.

Glenn Haybittle

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