Devotion

By: Louisa Young

Narrated by: Eve Karpf

Length: 14 hrs and 19 mins

Publisher's summary

From the bestselling author of My Dear, I Wanted to Tell You and The Heroes’ Welcome, Louisa Young's Devotion is a novel of family, love, race and politics set during the electric change of the 1930s.

Tom loves Nenna. Nenna loves her father. Her father loves Mussolini.

Ideals and convictions are not always so clear in the murky years between the end of the First World War and the beginning of the Second. For Tom and Kitty Locke, children of the damaged WW1 generation, visiting their cousin Nenna in Rome is a pure joy. For their adoptive parents Nadine and Riley, though, the ground is still shifting underfoot.

Nobody knew in 1919 that the children they were bearing would be just ripe for the next war in 1939; nobody knew, in 1935, the implications of an Italian Jewish family supporting Mussolini.

Meanwhile Peter Locke and Mabel Zachary have found each other again together in London, itself a city reborn but riddled with its own intolerances. As the heat rises across Europe, voices grow louder and everyone must brace once more to decide what should bring them together, and what must drive them apart.

Music composed by Robert Lockhart. Used by permission of Faber Music Ltd.

©2016 Louisa Young (P)2016 HarperCollins Publishers Limited

Critic reviews

‘Young has conjured up another rich historical novel and I longed to know the fate of this tragic cast of friends. These characters demand devotion — they’ll get it, too’ The Times

‘Elegantly written and compulsively readable, Devotion manages to be both thrilling and heartfelt – a real treasure of a book’ Jami Attenberg