The Garden of Angels
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
At his beloved Nonno Paolo's deathbed, fifteen-year-old Nico receives a gift that will change his life forever: a yellowing manuscript which tells the haunting, twisty tale of what really happened to his grandfather in Nazi-occupied Venice in 1943.
A Times Best Thriller Book of 2022
The Palazzo Colombina is home to the Uccello family: three generations of men, trapped together in the dusty palace on Venice’s Grand Canal. Awkward fifteen-year-old Nico. His distant, business-focused father. And his beloved grandfather, Paolo. Paolo is dying. But before he passes, he has secrets he’s waited his whole life to share.
When a Jewish classmate is attacked by bullies, Nico just watches – earning him a week’s suspension and a typed, yellowing manuscript from his frail Nonno Paolo. A history lesson, his grandfather says. A secret he must keep from his father. A tale of blood and madness . . .
Nico is transported back to the Venice of 1943, an occupied city seething under its Nazi overlords, and to the defining moment of his grandfather’s life: when Paolo’s support for a murdered Jewish woman brings him into the sights of the city’s underground resistance. Hooked and unsettled, Nico can’t stop reading – but he soon wonders if he ever knew his beloved grandfather at all.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
At the start of this multigenerational coming-of-age tale from Hewson (the Nic Costa series), Paolo Uccello, the dying patriarch of the House of Uccello, renowned Italian fabric weavers, has a story to tell his 15-year-old grandson, Nico, of his youth in Nazi-occupied Venice. Flashback to 1943. Paolo, then 18 and the newly orphaned owner of the failing family business, agrees to shelter 21-year-old Giovanni "Vanni" and 23-year-old Micaela "Mika" Artom, Jewish brother and sister partisans on the run from the Gestapo. Paolo in return asks for their help to finish weaving a commission for an important client arriving for a large gathering of Nazi VIPs. When Mika learns the client is Salvator Bruno, the infamous "Jew hunter" responsible for her own parents' deaths, she makes contact with local Resistance fighters and joins their mission to attack the celebration. Paulo finds himself emotionally and physically drawn to Vanni and will go to extraordinary lengths to protect him. A late-page revelation, meanwhile, will have readers gasping in surprise, and Hewson expertly balances tense action and thoughtful emotion. Fans of character-driven WWII thrillers will want to check this out.
