Hardback by Virago, £12.99 (ebook £8.99)
Second-time novelist and acclaimed short-story writer Virginia Baily
pulls off a triumph with Early One Morning – an exquisitely rendered
novel that explores how one powerful and unexpected love can shape a
life forever.
The novel opens in Rome, 1943. In the Jewish ghetto, men, women and
children are being rounded up by Nazi officers to be shipped off to
concentration camps. A passer-by – a young Italian woman, Chiara
Ravello, locks eyes with a Jewish mother. Knowing instinctively what
she is being asked to do, Chiara claims the woman’s son Daniele as
her own, saving him from a certain death. It is a moment that changes
her forever as her life becomes inextricably bound to that of the
traumatised little boy.
Thirty years later, we meet Chiara in her sixties; living alone in
Rome, she is still trying to move on after the loss of Daniele, who
vanished without trace in his twenties. Out of the blue, she receives
a call from Cardiff: it is a 16-year-old girl, claiming to be
Daniele’s daughter. It is a catalytic event that forces Chiara to
revisit the painful memories of what unfolded between her and Daniele
in the intervening years.
A complex and multi-layered narrative, the novel slips expertly back
and forth between two different time periods, following a handful of
characters across numerous locations. The settings are beautifully
evoked, creating striking contrasts between the tensions and
desperation of war-time and the freedom and stability of the 1970s.
The characters themselves are a gratifyingly unusual collection –
among them a grieving spinster, a damaged little boy, a petulant
teenager and a guilt-ridden priest – and each one is imbued with a
compelling aliveness that draws us into their orbit.
By turns witty, poignant, tragic and uplifting, this feast of a novel
will mark out its author as a powerful voice on the literary scene.
