The Sound of the Hours

by Karen Campbell

Overview

A sweeping and romantic novel about love, loss, and conflict in an occupied Italian town during World War II.

Trapped in Tuscany as war rages along the Gothic Line, Vittoria Guidi doesn't understand where her allegiances should lie. With her Scots-Italian father or Facsist mother? With Mussolini, or her King? With the life she wants, or is told to live?

As Germans occupy the mountains round Barga, and US Buffalo soldiers draw near, loyalties are tested and families torn apart. Frank Chapel, a young, black soldier fighting for a country that refuses him the vote, is unlike anyone Vita has met. In the chaos, they find each other—but can their growing love defy prejudice and war?

The Sound of the Hours is an all-consuming tale of romance and loss. It is at once an intimate and tender portrait of first love and a sweeping evocation of an extraordinary, devastating moment in history.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781408857373
Publisher:	Bloomsbury USA
Publication date:	09/17/2019
Pages:	464
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 8.40(h) x 1.60(d)

About the Author

Karen Campbell is a graduate of Glasgow University's renowned Creative Writing Masters program, and author of Rise, The Twilight Time, After the Fire, Shadowplay, Proof of Life, and This Is Where I Am, which was a BBC Radio 4 Book at Bedtime. A former police officer, and council PR, Karen Campbell won the Best New Scottish Writer Award in 2009. She lives in Galloway, Scotland.

www.karencampbell.co.uk

Editorial Reviews

07/22/2019

Campbell (Rise) vividly depicts the consequences of war as a young Italian woman tries to survive when her village becomes a battleground during WWII. In 1943 Cartagnana, Italy, 18-year-old Vita Guidi puts aside her plans to become a teacher to work as a housekeeper for the local priest. She and her family face the dangers of wartime as German soldiers occupy the town, and her father is arrested. Vita’s cousin Joe, a partisan fighter, is frequently absent, and Vita wonders whether they will marry as her family expects. When Vita and her sister, Cesca, leave their home to stay with their grandmother in Lucca, Vita meets Frank Chapel, a black soldier in the U.S. Army, as the Allies advance. Frank and Vita are drawn to one another as he continues to serve in a segregated Army and faces discrimination from Italians and fellow soldiers. As their friendship blossoms into love, Vita and Frank share stolen moments and live in constant peril from the bombs falling around them. They continue to hope for a future together that would transcend the prejudices against their relationship and the dangers of war. Campbell writes with lyricism and emotion in portraying her characters’ thoughts and emotions, and her story is expertly plotted. Fans of rich historicals will be totally immersed. Agent: Jo Unwin, Jo Unwin Literary Agency. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

[Campbell] is a vivid, distinctive writer who creates characters and stories we really care about . . . Gratifyingly, Campbell avoids easy answers, showing us that the pieces of most unions, personal and political, rarely fit neatly together, that true feeling comes into them unexpectedly, beyond the parts of our lives we think we can control.” —New York Times Book Review on RISE

“An engaging writer introduces herself with this fresh, intelligent entertainment, full of satisfying moving parts.” —Kirkus Reviews on RISE

“Campbell has admirably constructed the novel's plot . . . The historical details are informative . . . there are evocative descriptions . . . Highly recommended.” —The Historical Novel Society

“I loved it. A great, original character and the plot fairly whizzes along.” —Kate Atkinson on The Twilight Time

From the Publisher

2019-07-01
Sparks fly between unlikely allies—an African American GI and an Italian girl stripped to her essence by suffering—in a World War II romance set in the harshly defended Tuscan mountains.

Eighteen-year-old Vittoria Guidi joins the Italian partisans after she has lost almost everyone—her mother shot by the Nazis; her father deported to Germany; her cousins likely massacred in a nearby village. With family and meaning torn away and her town ransacked by the retreating German army, she has, she thinks, nothing left to lose. But recently, in Lucca, she met Frank Chapel, an American soldier in the Buffaloes—a segregated troop in the U.S. Army—and a connection sprang to life between them. Frank, battle-hardened by the loss of compatriots, the sheer physical toll of routing the Germans, and the steady drip of racial prejudice, will fight his way to Vittoria's community, and what began as a glance and a feeling will find the space to blossom. At its best, Campbell's (Rise, 2015, etc.) impassioned, impressionistic prose infuses her lead characters' feelings and circumstances with an intensity to match the merciless pressures of the era. Exploring a less familiar corner of the battlefield and the conflicting politics of place and time (Vittoria's mother supported the fascists, as did many Italians; black soldiers were the subject of intense negative propaganda), she delivers striking immediacy. It's at the periphery, with the secondary characters, that the novel seems weaker—the cartoon Blackshirt, all sneers and "pus-laden" acne; the token Jews; the gluttonous, meaty German general. Even college-boy Frank, smart and handsome, leans toward stereotype, but the love story, though familiar in form, becomes irresistible, especially in its late, poetic, heroic blaze of selflessness.

For fans of indomitable heroines and love in the time of conflict, here's a stirring new addition to the genre.

Kirkus Reviews

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