Liar Dice by Rebecca Gethin
pre-order: out October 2011
Petronella has never felt that her life was on course – from growing up in 1950s Yorkshire with a glamourous Italian mother, Maddalena, to her failed marriage and struggles with her son, but when her father, Alex, dies, she finds a chest containing her Italian mother’s belongings and sets out on a path of discovery. Translating an account of Maddalena’s war time experiences as part of a partisan brigade in the mountains, where Maddalena and Alex first met, Petronella begins to suspect that her father was implicated in the death of Vittorio, her mother’s lover who was captured by the Nazis following a tip-off from a collaborator. She makes the journey to Porto Romola and, helped by a local historian, Nando, pieces together not only her parents’ story, including the hours spent playing liar dice to while away time between operations, but also her own story; one that might include Nando.
“Gethin links present and past, the displayed and the concealed, fantasy and longing in this bittersweet tale of a woman’s growth towards self-knowledge… rooted in the rich soil of others’ lives, their dreams and their sacrifices, as generation follows generation. Compassionately imagined – Liar Dice is an engaging exploration of memory and identity.”
Maria McCann
Rebecca Gethin’s first collection, River is the Plural of Rain, was published by Oversteps Books in 2009 and she has read her poems both in London and Devon, on local radio and on television. She is currently a tutor of creative writing in a prison and occasionally runs workshops on the outside, too. Liar Dice is her first novel and was winner of the Cinnamon Press Novel Award 2010.
