Glass Mountain

The bestselling author of The Ruin of All Witches returns with a gripping, vividly told journey into his family's wartime pastMalcolm Gaskill knew two things about his great-uncle Ralph s wartime adventures: he d been a prisoner in Italy, and he d cut his way out of a train with a knife and fork. Apart from that, he d faded into family folklore, lost to view. Until, one hot afternoon in an English country garden, a chance conversation set Gaskill on his uncle s trail What Ralph really did in the war was, he discovers, even more extraordinary than the exaggerations of family myth. From last-ditch fighting in the Libyan desert and incarceration in a Puglian prisoner-of-war camp, to desperate, dramatic escapes and the assuming of an entirely new identity among the peasants and partisans of the Italian Alps, Gaskill traces a life transformed by conflict, while lifting the curtain on a long-forgotten episode of the Second World War.Yet The Glass Mountain is about more than war: it s a haunting exploration of what it means to encounter the past, and how we remember, forget and recover it. As he follows his uncle s path through dusty archives and the landscapes, towns and villages of present-day Italy, Gaskill finds himself confronted by questions that go to the heart of how we think about the people who came before us: Why do stories matter? How much of the past can ever be true?