In the final months of World War II, a clandestine group known as The Choir successfully smuggles thousands of escapees out of Nazi-occupied Rome via a secret route known as the Escape Line. When an unidentified airman falls wounded from the sky, The Choir is plunged into danger and the survival of the Escape Line itself is threatened.
The power of The Ghosts of Rome comes from the dazzling variety of voices employed, the sense of a world constructed in multiple dimensions. The contemporaneous narratives are related in an urgent present tense, with breathless sentences, single-line paragraphs ... By crafting a chorus of voices, he ensures that no single narrative dominates, reflecting the messy, multifaceted truths of history — both the way it is lived and how it is constructed in retrospect. What emerges is not just a wartime thriller, though it is that, but a meditation on how we remember, how we resist and how, even in the darkest times, humanity endures.
A literary sequel worth its salt should satisfy two types of readers: those who read the first installment and those who didn’t. Joseph O’Connor’s new novel is one such book ... The narrative comprises a vivid patchwork of varied voices and diverse texts, from letters to memoir extracts to interview transcripts to Gestapo reports ... Expertly rendered ... Richly atmospheric and pulsing with excitement.
