True Enemy

Angelo peers out the café door. A couple of kids are running down the pavement toward him laughing. One has a brick in his hand. Behind them a large mob spills across the wide boulevard. He ducks back inside and locks and bolts the door.

"Here they come."

In 1939 life could hardly be better for the Renaldi family. Emilio and his wife Francesca run a popular chippy on Leith Walk in Edinburgh. Lena makes top grades at Holy Cross Academy and her friend Imelda is more like a sister. Older brother Angelo has a girlfriend and a new job in the offing, while youngest Joe is obsessed only with football.

All will change though with the coming of war and Italy's alliance with Nazi Germany, as rampaging mobs wreck Italian businesses across Britain and mass arrests under Churchill's infamous edict "Collar the lot" tear innocent families apart.

True Enemy is the story of one family caught up in the brutal round-up of "enemy aliens" and later the tragic sinking of the converted transport ship SS Arandora Star - an event that brought unendurable grief but also forced a change in policy on wartime internment of foreign nationals.

James Killgore is an Edinburgh-based writer and has three published novels: Buck Falaya (Polygon), The Passage (Peachtree Publishers) and Soldier's Game (Kelpies, age 9-12), which was shortlisted for the Scottish Children's Book Awards.