Early One Morning, by Virginia Baily #BookReview

(Still making space on the B-shelf and reading this one at night while I tackle Nicola Barker’s 800+ page Darkmans by day…)

I came across Virginia Baily’s Early One Morning via the Readings catalogue back in 2015, and was intrigued by the blurb.  It’s about an Italian woman who rescues a child from the Nazi round-up of Jews, and what happens afterwards.

It’s not really a book about war or about the Holocaust, but more about how it is much harder to work with traumatised children than it seems and about how the urge to find out about parents and forebears isn’t always a quest with a happy ending.  But it’s not a grim book: it is surprisingly humorous in places, with some splendid self-deprecating female central characters undercutting any pretensions to heroism or self-pity.  It is also a book centred on female preoccupations: the perspectives of the male characters have to…