The Glass Mountain: Escape and Discovery in Wartime Italy

The author of The Ruin of All Witches returns with a gripping, vividly told journey of rediscovery, uncovering his uncle’s past as a soldier, prisoner, fugitive and partisan in World War Two Italy Malcolm Gaskill knew two things about his great-uncle Ralph’s wartime adventures: he’d been a prisoner in Italy, and he’d cut his way out of a train with a knife and fork.Apart from that, he’d faded into family folklore, lost to view.Until, one hot afternoon in an English country garden, a chance conversation set Gaskill on his uncle’s trail…What Ralph really did in the war was, he discovers, even more extraordinary than the exaggerations of family myth.From last-ditch fighting in the Libyan desert and incarceration in a Puglian prisoner-of-war camp, to desperate, dramatic escapes and the assuming of an entirely new identity among the peasants and partisans of the Italian alps, Gaskill traces a life transformed by conflict, while lifting the curtain on a long-forgotten episode of the Second W