Devotion

Description

From the bestselling author of My Dear, I Wanted to Tell You and The Heroes' Welcome, Louisa Young's Devotion is a novel of family, love, race and politics set during the electric change of the 1930s. Tom loves Nenna. Nenna loves her father. Her father loves Mussolini. Ideals and convictions are not always so clear in the murky years between the end of the First World War and the beginning of the Second. For Tom and Kitty Locke, children of the damaged WW1 generation, visiting their cousin Nenna in Rome is a pure joy. For their adoptive parents Nadine and Riley, though, the ground is still shifting underfoot. Nobody knew in 1919 that the children they were bearing would be just ripe for the next war in 1939; nobody knew, in 1935, the implications of an Italian Jewish family supporting Mussolini. Meanwhile Peter Locke and Mabel Zachary have found each other again together in London, itself a city reborn but riddled with its own intolerances. As the heat rises across Europe, voices grow louder and everyone must brace once more to decide what should bring them together, and what must drive them apart.

Louisa Young was a journalist for some years. Her first book was A Great Task of Happiness (1995), the life of Kathleen Bruce, her grandmother, the sculptor and wife of Scott of the Antarctic. She followed that with her Egyptian trilogy of novels: Baby Love (which was listed for the Orange Prize), Desiring Cairo and Tree of Pearls. They were followed by The Book of the Heart, a cultural history of our most symbolic organ. She has also published a trilogy of children's novels, written with her ten-year-old daughter under the pseudonym Zizou Corder. Her most recent novel, The Heroes' Welcome is a follow-up to the 2011 bestseller My Dear, I Wanted to Tell You, which was shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award 2011 and the Wellcome Book Prize, was a Richard and Judy Book Club choice, and the first ever winner of the Galaxy Audiobook of the Year. She lives in London with her daughter.

Praise for DEVOTION: 'Young has conjured up another rich historical novel and I longed to know the fate of this tragic cast of friends. These characters demand devotion - they'll get it, too' The Times 'A stirring story of war and its consequences ... tender and convincing. Well-drawn female characters complete an engaging saga' Mail on Sunday 'Anybody who hasn't read her WW1 and postwar trilogy ... should get buying. An absolutely magnificent trilogy ... three volumes is not enough. I NEED to know more ... and sparking such a need is a triumph for a novelist' Bel Mooney 'This moving and vivid historical novel ... cleverly interleaves the personal and the political, portraying the conflicts of loyalty produced by troubled times with great subtlety ... written with real knowledge and affection' Tablet 'Elegantly written and compulsively readable, Devotion manages to be both thrilling and heartfelt - a real treasure of a book' Jami Attenberg 'Young expertly weaves politics, race and loyalty into the family's narrative' Observer 'Powerful and evocative ... a must-read' Woman and Home 'Deeply moving ... a great 20th-century saga' Saga Magazine 'A gorgeously compelling story of family, love and race' Prima Magazine 'A sumptuous portrayal of love and war in fascist Rome' Observer