The Light Over the Piave

Friuli, 1915. Bells ring out in the town square: Italy has entered the war. Twenty-two-year-old Elena Moretti leaves her quiet life in Cividale del Friuli to train as a volunteer Red Cross nurse. In the ward of a field hospital set up in an old schoolhouse, she meets Luca Ferraro, an artillery lieutenant so gravely wounded that no one expected him to survive.

Amidst changing bandages and stolen letters, a love blossoms-one that must withstand it all: the battles of the Isonzo, the rout at Caporetto, a flight across a nation brought to its knees, and the long wait at the Piave front. A wedding arranged with barely six days' notice. A brother held prisoner in an Austrian camp. And finally, perhaps, peace.

But Elena and Luca's story does not end in 1918; it spans the Fascist era, a second world war, and six decades of an ordinary life built-day by day-upon the ruins of their century's greatest catastrophe. Until, generations later, a great-granddaughter rediscovers their letters in an attic trunk and realizes that some stories ask for nothing more than to be remembered.

A sweeping novel about love, the quiet courage of women in wartime, and the human capacity to rebuild-much like the bridges the protagonist will dedicate his life to restoring-everything that history destroys.