Stones in Water

An illicit trip to see a western by Roberto and his Jewish friend Samuele in second world war Venice leads to them being rounded up and deported to a Nazi labour camp. There they struggle to support each other’s survival and to keep Samuele’s ethnicity a secret. Eventually they are dispatched to the murderous austerities of a camp in the Ukraine, where their friendship and resilience are tested to the utmost limits. This is a riveting book which combines the compulsive narrative drive of an adventure story with the kind of harrowing reflections on human motivations towards good and evil that remind the reader that this is not an adventure yarn but a fictionalised account of real events with grim contemporary parallels.