[]
The Innocent Days of War
  • Published: 9 December 2025
  • ISBN: 9781635424140
  • Imprint: Other Press
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 240
  • RRP: $35.00

The Innocent Days of War

A Novel

Formats & editions
EBook
28 Oct 2025
Paperback
9 Dec 2025
Buy from…
Amazon Booktopia Dymocks QBD Readings Your Bookstore Abbeys Boomerang Find local retailers Find local retailers Collins Fishpond Gleebooks Harry Hartog Kinokuniya Robinsons The Nile Mighty Ape

In this gripping coming-of-age novel, a group of young people’s lives and passions collide in unexpected ways as World War II transforms Italy and England.

Central Italy, on the eve of the Second World War. A group of young Italians find themselves in the midst of what will soon become a civil war. Among them is Stefano Portelli, a hopeful lawyer with a head full of utopias, in love with Eleonora. And there is his sister-in-law Nina, secretly linked to Sergio, a partisan leader.

Other lives run parallel to theirs: that of Alastair Ormiston, an English Royal Air Force Pilot, who adores Virginia Woolf's books and dreams of the ideal companion. And that of Edna, his best friend who, in a London bombed by the Nazis, discovers herself and her happiness. If their paths intersect in a shocking way, shuffling the cards of history, it will be through the work of a destiny greater than them, burning them in a bonfire where everything is consumed—joy and pain together.
  • Published: 9 December 2025
  • ISBN: 9781635424140
  • Imprint: Other Press
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 240
  • RRP: $35.00
Categories:

About the authors

Mario Fortunato

Mario Fortunato was born in Cirò, Calabria, Italy. For three decades he worked as a literary critic for the Italian current affairs magazine L’Espresso and directed the Italian Cultural Institute in London. In addition to writing novels such as South (Other Press, 2023), a New York Times Best Historical Fiction Book of the Year, and The Innocent Days of War (Other Press, 2025), he has translated into Italian works by Evelyn Waugh, Virginia Woolf, and Henry James.
portrait photo of Mario Fortunato

Julia MacGibbon

Julia MacGibbon has translated works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, including Marta Barone’s Sunken City. She lives near Rome.
JM

Praise for The Innocent Days of War

Praise for South:

“[An] archly observed novel…playful, kaleidoscopic…wonderfully eccentric minor characters—chauffeurs, nursemaids, household servants—vie for center stage with the equally eccentric bourgeois clans that employ them…it’s ‘like a page out of Proust but without any aristocrats.’” —New York Times Book Review

“[An] exuberant, dizzying family saga…[a] wild ride through twentieth-century Italy, both political and personal.” —Booklist