The Curse of Pietro Houdini

"This novel is set in Italy in 1943, in and around the Abbey of Monte Cassino. It’s a heist-within-a heist. There’s a definite quest, which is made very clear at the beginning of the story. The main characters are a 14-year-old boy called Massimo, who is not quite who he seems. He meets an older man, Pietro Houdini, who rescues Massimo after he’s been attacked by a group of boys. Pietro Houdini is posing as someone restoring works of art, and they go to the Abbey, which is full to the brim with the most important artworks in Italy. Italy is occupied by Germany and under fascism and the Allies are gradually advancing northward. You know that this war is going to come upon them in Monte Cassino. Houdini’s plan is to steal three paintings from the Nazis, while the Nazis themselves are emptying the Abbey of all these incredible treasures. The fact the Nazis did that saved a lot of that art, because although they may have been intending to steal it, a good proportion of it ended up in the Vatican—while the Abbey was bombed to smithereens by the Allies. I don’t know much about art history, so I learned a lot from the book. And I rarely read war stories, but I loved reading about this different side of war. It wasn’t that there weren’t terrible trauma and atrocities—there were—but there was a huge adventure happening between these two characters too. After the heist, it’s a question of, ‘How are these characters going to escape?’ Partly it’s how are they going to escape the Nazis, but also how are they going to escape the Allies? What we, the judges, loved was the weaving of real history with story, and the story between these two characters. We all felt the author did that brilliantly well. It was historically accurate and yet there was this whole other adventure happening."