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List Price: $15.00Amazon.com's Price: $10.20 You Save: $4.80 (32%)Prices subject to change.
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780449004135
ISBN: 0449004139
Label: Ballantine Books
Manufacturer: Ballantine Books
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 464
Publication Date: December 06, 2005
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Release Date: December 06, 2005
Sales Rank: 8186
Studio: Ballantine Books
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Editorial Review:
Product Description:
Set in Italy during the dramatic finale of World War II, this new novel is the first in seven years by the bestselling author of The Sparrow and Children of God.
It is September 8, 1943, and fourteen-year-old Claudette Blum is learning Italian with a suitcase in her hand. She and her father are among the thousands of Jewish refugees scrambling over the Alps toward Italy, where they hope to be safe at last, now that the Italians have broken with Germany and made a separate peace with the Allies. The Blums will soon discover that Italy is anything but peaceful, as it becomes overnight an open battleground among the Nazis, the Allies, resistance fighters, Jews in hiding, and ordinary Italian civilians trying to survive.
Mary Doria Russell sets her first historical novel against this dramatic background, tracing the lives of a handful of fascinating characters. Through them, she tells the little-known but true story of the network of Italian citizens who saved the lives of forty-three thousand Jews during the war’s final phase. The result of five years of meticulous research, A Thread of Grace is an ambitious, engrossing novel of ideas, history, and marvelous characters that will please Russell’s many fans and earn her even more.
From the Hardcover edition.
Amazon.com Review:
Mary Doria Russell's extraordinary and complex historical novel, A Thread of Grace, is the kind of book that you will find yourself haunted by long after finishing the last page. It opens with a group of Jewish refugees being escorted to safe-keeping by Italian soldiers. After making the arduous journey over a steep mountain pass, they are welcomed into a small village with warm food and clean beds. They have barely laid their heads to rest when news is received that Mussolini has just surrendered Italy to Hitler, putting them in danger yet again. This opening sequence is a grim foreshadowing of the heart-breaking journey these characters will experience in their struggle for survival.
The rich fictional narrative is woven through the factual military maneuvers and political games at the end of WW II, sharing a little-known story of a group of Italian citizens that sheltered more than 40,000 Jews from grueling work camp executions. Rather than the bleak and hopeless feeling that might be expected, the novel has the opposite effect; it reminds us that just as there will always be war, crime, and death, so too will there be good people who selflessly sacrifice themselves to ease the suffering of others. Perhaps best of all, Russell succinctly opens and closes her writing with short pieces that bookend the story with the force of a freight train. Her moving finale wraps up her narrative in the present day, with a death bed scene that's sure to rip the heart out of readers of every faith and ancestry.
On the surface, Russell's third novel may seem quite different from her earlier works. Both The Sparrow and its sequel, Children of God , were futuristic stories about Earth's first contact with alien life forms, but a closer look reveals several similarities. Fans of her earlier books will be pleased to find that Emilio Sandoz, the charismatic Jesuit priest from the first two books, finds new life in Renzo Leoni--A Thread of Grace's charming and haunted chameleon. The two have different circumstances and histories, but both characters are made of the same cloth--tormented by their consciences and plagued by unrequited love. Also similar to her earlier books, the characters in A Thread of Grace don't all enjoy a happy ending. A note in the reader's guide tells us that Russell flipped a coin to determine the fate of some of the characters. This may be upsetting for many readers, particularly those used to Hollywood endings, but it does serve as a frank reminder of the arbitrary nature of war and death. --Victoria Griffith
Average Rating: 
Rating:  -
This is a good historical novel to glimpse the chaos and misery of Italy in WWII from 1943-1945 - and brings some philosophical questions as well: what is worth dying for? Can resistance in war be nonviolent? How to accept a world where you cannot keep your loved ones safe?....
Rating:  -
This is a very intense novel. A little difficult to read due to the
italain and also the introduction of a large cast of characters at the beginning. She does however give a chart of who the characters are.
A piece of history that has been easily forgotten the subject/ plot was
superb. This makes this an enjoyable and memorable book.
True to Mary Doria Russell the ending is dynamic and shocking; that is her modus operandus. I definitely recommend thi.
Rating: -
Very interesting novel based on extensive research of the northwest region of Italy after Italy capitulated during WWII and the Germans then occupied Italy. The story describes the tremendous risks the Italian people took to hide both Italian Jews as well as Jews who had escaped from other Nazi-occupied countries.
Although I have read numerous Holocaust-related stories, I was unaware of these historical events. Mary Doria Russell is to be commended for taking a complex subject area ... Read More
Rating:  -
As I have indicated in my many reviews of books from this period, I am a fan of tales of the human courage that was displayed throughout Europe in WW2 by ordinary people doing extraordinary things in the face of incredible danger. In as expert a fashion as Alan Furst in The Polish Officer: A Novel and Douglas W Jacobson in Night of Flames: A Novel of World War II, Mary Doria Russell brings us up close and personal with compelling characters we care about. Expertly crafted are Doktor Schramm, the Nazi ... Read More
Rating: -
I like books with happy endings. A Thread of Grace, by Mary Doria Russell, is not a book of happy endings - not at all. Yet, I will read it again next year.
I don't just like her book, I love it. In the midst of a story that covers the worst atrocity in human history, and littered with characters of questionable morality and worse deeds, Mary Doria Russell manages to find a thread of grace, and to convince me that it is genuine and enduring.
Russell visited the places she describes ... Read More
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