One Good Thing
A Novel
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- 9,49 €
Publisher Description
From the New York Times-bestselling author of We Were the Lucky Ones, a propulsive and heart-wrenching story of a young woman entrusted with a boy’s life as WWII rages in Italy
1940, Italy. Lili and Esti have been best friends since they first met at university. When Esti’s son Theo is born, they become as close as sisters. While a war seethes across borders, life somehow goes on—until Germany invades Italy, and the friends suddenly find themselves in occupied territory.
Esti, older and fiercely self-assured, convinces Lili to join the resistance efforts. But when disaster strikes, a critically wounded Esti asks Lili to take a much bigger step: To go on the run with Theo. Protect him while Esti can’t.
Terrified to travel on her own, Lili sets out with Theo on a harrowing journey south toward Allied territory, braving Nazi-occupied villages and bombed-out cities, doing everything she can to keep the boy safe.
A remarkable tale of friendship, romance, motherhood, and survival, One Good Thing reminds us what is worth fighting for—and that love, even amidst a world in ruins, can triumph.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Hunter follows her bestseller We Were the Lucky Ones with a stirring novel of bravery and sacrifice in WWII Italy. Esti and Lili, two 20-something Jewish women, resist fascism and anti-Semitism by forging IDs and helping to shelter orphaned refugee children. When Esti is badly beaten by a pro-Mussolini gang, she urges Lili to take Esti's three-year-old son, Theo, and run. Avoiding trains, where they would risk arrest, Lili and Theo trek mostly on foot across Italy. In Rome, she meets Thomas, an escaped American POW disguised in a German uniform, and helps him search for his regiment. Thomas and Theo take to each other immediately, and Lili slowly realizes she's in love with the American. All along, she writes letters to Esti and to her own father, Massimo, who has fled to Switzerland. Lili and Massimo reunite, but she never hears back from Esti, who is rumored to have been sent to Auschwitz. Hunter movingly depicts the bond between Lili and the precocious Theo, and ends the novel on a hopeful note without flinching from the war's horrors. Fans of Hunter's previous book and the miniseries based on it will be pleased.
