The Ghosts of Rome
Book 2 in The Rome Escape Line Trilogy
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4.3 • 27 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
A New York Times Editors’ Choice・Book Riot Best Book of 2025・Guardian Best Book of 2025・Irish Book of the Year 2025
★ “Mesmerising, tragic, horrifying, utterly unputdownable... An outstanding read for fans of WWII fiction and of writers like Anthony Doerr.”—Emily Melton, Booklist (Starred Review)
In the final months of World War II, a clandestine group known as The Choir successfully smuggles thousands of escapees out of Nazi-occupied Rome via a secret route known as the Escape Line. When an unidentified airman falls wounded from the sky, The Choir is plunged into danger and the survival of the Escape Line itself is threatened.
The Escape Line’s collapse would leave thousands stranded. Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty, its architect and the acknowledged leader of The Choir, broods inside the Vatican, paralyzed by the perils of keeping his Roman underground railroad functioning. Meanwhile, SS Commander Paul Hauptmann has been tasked with destroying the entire operation, and the price of failure is high—his wife and children are under Gestapo lock-and-key in Berlin. Into this deliriously thrilling melee steps Contessa Giovanna Landini, a reckless, audacious, and magnetic member of the Italian Resistance who has the nerve to challenge Hauptmann’s authority.
Beautifully written and expertly crafted, The Ghosts of Rome is a historical suspense novel bursting with action, atmosphere, and unforgettable characters by one of contemporary fiction’s most acclaimed and beloved writers.
“The power of The Ghosts of Rome comes from the dazzling variety of voices employed, the sense of a world constructed in multiple dimensions... What emerges is not just a wartime thriller, though it is that, but a meditation on how we remember, how we resist and how, even in the darkest times, humanity endures.”—Alex Preston, The New York Times Book Review
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The pulse-pounding second volume in O'Connor's Roman Escape Line trilogy (after My Father's House) follows Vatican monsignor Hugh O'Flaherty and his co-conspirators, known as the Choir, as they help Allied soldiers and Jews escape Nazi-occupied Rome in 1944. Gestapo commander Paul Hauptmann is bent on breaking up the group—his wife and two children are being held hostage in Germany by Heinrich Himmler until he hunts down and captures the Choir's members, including Contessa Giovanna "Jo" Landini. The plot heats up when two escaped POWs and a wounded Polish pilot are trapped in Rome. The youngest Choir member, 19-year-old Blon Kiernan, risks her life to find a sympathetic doctor to operate on the Pole before he dies. Then, in a tense extended sequence, Jo and the Choir try to spirit the three escapees to safety right under Hauptmann's nose. The suspenseful 1944 chapters are interspersed with snippets of BBC interviews with former Choir members in the 1960s and an unpublished memoir by Jo, which provide a layered historical perspective ("In those weeks, I saw many a strange and haunting sight, but none stranger than the starlit life many of the escapees made for themselves among the Eternal City's rooftops," the Contessa writes). O'Connor captivates with his vigorous portrayal of wartime Rome.
Customer Reviews
Good
Writing style could be better. There are too many digressions and incomplete sentences.