The Kappillan of Malta

Description

Father Salvatore was a simple, lumbering priest, a kappillan serving the poor Valetta, when war came out of the blue skies to pound the island to dust. Now amid the catacombs discovered by a chance bomb, he cared for the flood of homeless, starving, frightened people who sought shelter from the death that fell unceasingly from the sky. His story, and the story of Malta, is told in superbly graphic pictures of six days during the siege. Each of those days brought forth from the kappillan a message of inspiration to keep them going - the legendary tales of six mighty events of Malta's history which shone through the centuries and gathered them together in a fervent belief in their survival. This novel is an achievement in two separate dimensions: as a sublime portrait of a humble man who brought faith and hope and comfort to a stricken people, and as the story of an island whose violent history began with the Phoenicians and which suffered its most terrible agony in the Second World War.

See description above. After the war, Monsarrat's career as diplomat and novelist took every twist and turn in the book. He died of cancer in 1979 and was buried at sea from a destroyer, off Portsmouth.