About a Book

In Mark Sullivan 's Beneath a Scarlet Sky ,  Pino Lella is a teenager on the cusp of manhood in Milan , Italy , as Hitler and the Nazis are murdering Jews there during World War II.  Frightened by the increased violence in the city, Pino’s parents send him to live with a priest outside the city, where Pino begins guiding Jews to safety through treacherous mountain passes into Switzerland . When his parents force Pino to join the German SS as a way to keep safe from Hitler’s increasing hostilities, he becomes a spy. Driving General Hans Leyers , Hitler’s main weapons man in Italy for the last two years of the war, Mimo provides valuable information to the Allied forces and partisans. At the same time, he struggles to compartmentalize the atrocities he sees General Leyers inflict. He is reminded by his uncle that he can’t save every Jew, but that his spy work is saving many more than he sees harmed. Pino Lella’s story is a true one, and the author worked with the m...

Ian McGuire wants you to move in The North Water , and he moves the story along through one adventure after another, making for an exhilarating, at times exhausting read. The book focuses on two men, Patrick Sumner and Henry Drax, who both end up working on a whaling ship named the Volunteer in the north of England in the 19 th century. Because of some prior bad acts on Sumner’s part, and a life of them on Drax’s, the two men find themselves on the boat because they have few other places to go-few others who would have them. McGuire sets up his two main characters as opposites. Sumner is the ship’s doctor, and while his addiction to opium cost him an entire life of friends and a place in society before boarding the ship, he is shown to be a man driven by a moral sense of right and wrong. Drax, on the other hand, spends the day before the ship sets sail raping and murdering a young boy. In just about every scene with Drax, the formidable man makes you think he could slice t...