This was such an interesting story, it started slowly, lots of character building, moving between London, Dublin, then Italy. The picture builds of the differing lifestyles and cultures. The main characters are all really hiding big parts of their personal lives. Bella finds the new lifestyle quite hard to get use to at first, but eventually grows to love everything about her new home. The child she has come to teach becomes very, very important to her. He looks to her for most of his emotional needs, in the absence of his very distant mother. She shares his care with his piano teacher, the mysterious Edward, they spend time together with the child, but their secrets block any romance forming between them. So by the time the newspapers start to fill with the doom and gloom of an almost inevitable war, she is devastated at the prospect of leaving Italy to return to her homeland....the grey, gloomy, prewar London. The tension at this point is tremendous! The sad, very moving details of the Fascist treatment of the Jews, changing the lives of everyone in Italy, in ways that they couldn't comprehend, chilled me to the bone. You can feel the emotion, as the heavenly, relaxed, privileged lives they had known begin to change. They have to leave and this is very, very stressful. She at least gets back home, but not without much heartache. This story could continue via the lives of it's many characters and I would love for this to happen, it branches off in many directions along the way. So many continuing life stories remained untold.Excellent!! It is the mid-1930s and Bella�s father sends her to Mussolini�s Italy to become a nanny to a young boy. Among growing anti-Semitism and political uncertainty, Bella grows to love the boy and his Jewish family, but is forced to flee as the threat of war grows ever stronger and life becomes increasingly difficult for Italy�s Jewish population. Insert extreme peril here![return][return]The book was mostly written from Bella�s perspective, with brief interludes from Edward at the beginning, and then more from Bella�s granddaughter Anna towards the end. Edward himself was a very interesting figure and I would have liked to have heard more from him, especially as the plot thickened and approached the bit with all the peril. I sensed Bella�s attachment to him, but it was hard to get a grip on his thoughts about her, and what else was happening in his head. He has an interesting back story and I thought there was a lot of room for Hickey to explore that a bit more than she did.[return][return]I thought this book was going to be great. I�m into peril and disaster and Holocaust Studies. Unfortunately, Christine Dwyer Hickey let me down by writing Bella as an irritatingly anachronistic Victorian lady, prone to fainting fits and other stereotypically �womanly� vices. I found myself just wanting her to shut up, lock herself away in a darkened room with her smelling salts, and let somebody else tell the story. I admit this is a harsh attitude to adopt towards a fictional character but it drove me to distraction. The parts written from Anna�s perspective seemed a little superfluous, although it was an interesting attempt to portray a character digging up a relative�s darkest secrets from the past.[return][return]The quality of the writing was the redeeming feature of this. It made me want to hop on a train seventy years ago and get myself down to Italy. I would probably read more from this author, as long as she promised not to produce another bellyache like Bella.
What do You think about Last Train From Liguria (2009)?
great read,i have read "tatty" also and this one didnt dissappoint.
—Spatapati
Good read but hard to follow due to be written in 3 perspective.
—vitux
Gobbled this book up in 2 days--beautifully written
—09360769265
