Aubrey Nye Hamilton Reviews: My Father’s House by Joseph O’Connor

Dublin-born Joseph O’Connor has written novels and screenplays and has won a number of international literary awards. His latest book My Father’s House (Europa, 2023) fictionalizes the heroic efforts of Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty (1898-1963) and a small network who in 1943 and 1944 smuggled Jews and Allied personnel out of Italy despite the best efforts of the occupying Germans to stop them. O’Flaherty is credited with saving some 6500 lives while risking his own. O’Flaherty’s exploits were depicted in the 1983 television film The Red and the Black and in a radio play called The Scarlet Pimpernel of the Vatican.

Members of the network found places in the Vatican and in Rome for the escapees to hide while waiting for an opportunity to move into a more rural, and therefore safer, area or to leave Italy. The network also collected donations to arrange for forged passports and identity cards as well as transport costs. The book focuses on Christmas Eve 1943, when the group had learned German vigilance would be relaxed and moving around Rome unobserved would be easier. The goal was to drop off hundreds of dollars in three different places to pass down the line of individuals helping the fugitives to safety.

The measures they took to protect all involved were extreme. Nothing in writing, everything memorized in code. The network met weekly ostensibly as a choir and as a few of them sang, the others would discuss next steps. Money was sewn into the lining of clothing or stuffed into Christmas cakes. The couriers with the money traversed the Vatican and Rome through the centuries-old underground catacombs.

O’Connor paints a tense and frightening picture of occupied Rome, when one misstep could mean torture and a slow painful death. The descriptive passages are sumptuously composed, lavish with imagery. It’s easy to understand why O’Connor has won so many literary awards. A section at the end explains how much of the story is true (a good deal) and where the author took creative license. For fans of historical fiction, historical thrillers, and World War Two novels and for lovers of beautiful writing.

Starred reviews from Booklist, Publishers Weekly, and Kirkus.

 

  

·         Publisher: ‎Europa Editions (January 31, 2023)

·         Language: ‎English

·         Hardcover: ‎440 pages

·         ISBN-10: ‎1609458354

·         ISBN-13: ‎978-1609458355

 

Aubrey Nye Hamilton ©2023

Aubrey Hamilton is a former librarian who works on Federal It projects by day and reads mysteries at night.