Mary Doria Russell's extraordinary and complex historical novel, A Thread of Grace, is the kind of book that you will find yourself haunted by long after finishing the last page. It opens with a group of Jewish refugees being escorted to safe-keeping by Italian soldiers. After making the arduous journey over a steep mountain pass, they are welcomed into a small village with warm food and clean beds. They have barely laid their heads to rest when news is received that Mussolini has just surrendered Italy to Hitler, putting them in danger yet again. This opening sequence is a grim foreshadowing of the heart-breaking journey these characters will experience in their struggle for survival.

The rich fictional narrative is woven through the factual military maneuvers and political games at the end of WW II, sharing a little-known story of a group of Italian citizens that sheltered more than 40,000 Jews from grueling work camp executions. Rather than the bleak and hopeless feeling that might be expected, the novel has the opposite effect; it reminds us that just as there will always be war, crime, and death, so too will there be good people who selflessly sacrifice themselves to ease the suffering of others. Perhaps best of all, Russell succinctly opens and closes her writing with short pieces that bookend the story with the force of a freight train. Her moving finale wraps up her narrative in the present day, with a death bed scene that's sure to rip the heart out of readers of every faith and ancestry.

On the surface, Russell's third novel may seem quite different from her earlier works. Both The Sparrow and its sequel, Children of God , were futuristic stories about Earth's first contact with alien life forms, but a closer look reveals several similarities. Fans of her earlier books will be pleased to find that Emilio Sandoz, the charismatic Jesuit priest from the first two books, finds new life in Renzo Leoni--A Thread of Grace's charming and haunted chameleon. The two have different circumstances and histories, but both characters are made of the same cloth--tormented by their consciences and plagued by unrequited love. Also similar to her earlier books, the characters in A Thread of Grace don't all enjoy a happy ending. A note in the reader's guide tells us that Russell flipped a coin to determine the fate of some of the characters. This may be upsetting for many readers, particularly those used to Hollywood endings, but it does serve as a frank reminder of the arbitrary nature of war and death. --Victoria Griffith

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Busy, noisy and heartfelt, this sprawling novel by Russell—a striking departure from her previous two acclaimed SF thrillers, The Sparrow and Children of God—chronicles the Italian resistance to the Germans during the last two years of WWII. Three cultures mingle uneasily in Porto Sant'Andrea on the Ligurian coast of northwest Italy—the Italian Jews of the village, headed by the chief rabbi Iacopo Soncini; the Italian Catholics, like Sant'Andrea's priest Don Osvaldo Tomitz, who befriend and shelter the Jews; and the occupying Germans invited by Mussolini's crumbling regime. In the last camp is the drunken, tubercular Nazi deserter, Doktor Schramm, a broken man who confesses to Don Osvaldo that while working in state hospitals and Auschwitz, he was responsible for murdering 91,867 people. Meanwhile, Jewish refugees in southern France, including Albert Blum and his teenage daughter, Claudette, are fleeing across the Alps to Italy, hoping to find sanctuary there. Russell pursues numerous narrative threads, including the Blums' perilous flight over the mountains; Italian Jew Renzo Leoni's personal coming to terms with his participation in the Dolo hospital bombing during the Abyssinian campaign in 1935; the dangerous frenzy of the Italian partisans; and the bloody-mindedness of German officers resolved to carry out Hitler's murderous racial policy despite mounting evidence of its futility. The action moves swiftly, with impressive authority, jostling dialogue, vibrant personalities and meticulous, unexpected historical detail. The intensity and intimacy of Russell's storytelling, her sharp character writing and fierce sense of humor bring fresh immediacy to this riveting WWII saga. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
Mary Doria Russell is a talented writer of large ambition. To juggle some two dozen principal characters, and as many more minor ones, is daring; so is her willingness to combine them in transactions that are truly bizarre. Imagine that during World War II, a German military doctor, Werner Schramm, crushed by remorse, confesses to an Italian priest that he has murdered 91,867 people. Imagine that the ailing Schramm, having deserted, is nursed in hiding by a rabbi's wife, and that he argues with her about euthanasia for "defective children," when she is still mourning a beloved Mongoloid daughter. And finally imagine that when the priest to whom he confessed, Don Osvaldo Tomitz, is horribly tortured by the Gestapo for not giving up the Jews he is hiding, it is Schramm who brings him peace.Russell's powerful writing makes such improbable connections not merely dramatic but plausible.In the folklore of World War II, compared with other combatants, Italy has conspicuously lacked heroes, its fighting qualities widely derided. "What do Italians call half a million men with their hands in the air? The army!" That is a joke told here by Germans bitter after Italy withdrew from the war in 1943. This novel -- based on the historical record -- challenges that impression, at least for the mountainous northwest corner of Italy from 1943-45. The story is thickly populated with Italian heroes -- Jews, Catholics, Communists and partisans. They include priests, nuns, peasants and border guards willing to risk, and forfeit, their lives to save Jews from deportation to Nazi death camps. Deportations had accelerated when the Germans occupied Italy to stop the advancing Allied forces.Until Mussolini caved in to Hitler in 1938 and began persecuting Jews himself, Italian Jews had better reason than their German co-religionists to feel secure from fascist racism. Jews had been planted in Italian soil since the dawn of Christianity, when 10 percent of the population of the Roman Empire was Jewish, their earliest synagogues predating the Vatican. For their courageous fighting in World War I, Jews were declared full citizens by King Victor Emanuel III. In heavy irony, we learn this from an SS officer instructing his subordinates on the difficulty of rooting out Jews for deportation, given the loyalty of non-Jewish Italians.If this sounds like too much history lesson and too little novel, that is far from the case. One can excuse a few strands of dialogue heavy with exposition because Russell has an astonishing story to tell -- full of action, paced like a rapid-fire thriller, in tense, vivid scenes that move with cinematic verve. At times I felt there was an overabundance of characters to keep track of (the cast list at the beginning is essential), but they are worth our attention. There is Claudette, a sulky, self-centered Jewish teenager fleeing from Belgium, transformed into wife, mother, partisan fighter. There is Santino, the Sicilian infantryman and border guard who falls in love as he guides her family across the mountains and ultimately demonstrates heart-breaking nobility. There is Lidia, a sardonic, aristocratic Jewish woman, full of irony and love for her son, Renzo, an alcoholic former fighter pilot riven with guilt for his role in Mussolini's slaughter of Abyssinians. Renzo is a witty chameleon, masquerading in several guises to outwit the Germans. In one of many deeply affecting scenes, he flirts with a sweet novice nun, Sister Corniglia, while distracting two frightened Jewish children with a brilliant story.The use of the present tense in much of the narration accelerates the pace, and sometimes I felt hustled a little too quickly past these memorable events and characters, perhaps because A Thread of Grace lacks the singular hero and heroine of novelistic convention. A screenwriter would have to pump up the young lovers, Claudette and Santino, to make leading roles worthy of star power. This is a book of ensemble heroism, extraordinarily rich in details of how the people -- city dwellers and mountain peasants -- live: their houses, their clothing, their food and how they prepare it, the landscape they live in. Knowing so much about their material lives, we enter too little into the interior selves of these striking characters, leaving them merely sketched, given to act in situations of unbearable power that are strangely under-inhabited. As in the movies, we know them by what they do and the actions they take, often precipitously, unpremeditatedly; we do not fully know these people, and this being a rich novel, not a movie, we want to. Though lightly drawn and delineated by action, they invite deeper scrutiny.I sense a tension in this writer, who seems torn between a desire to linger and explore her interesting creations more fully and a need to keep the action racing forward. The action wins. An addictive page-turner, A Thread of Grace satisfies our need to be reminded of how warmly inspiring humanity can be when it is moved to be generous, tolerant and forgiving.Reviewed by Robert MacNeil Copyright 2005, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

From Bookmarks Magazine
In Thread of Grace, Russell-a Roman Catholic of Italian heritage who converted to Judaism-explores Italy’s response to German occupation, the fate of its Jews, and the actions of individuals. The story, which shifts to different (and sometimes unrelated) characters and subplots, alienated a few critics. Most, however, found that the depth of characterization forged a cohesive narrative and created complex layers of emotion, history, and horror that aptly represent wartime. Reviewers also forgave the ambiguous motives that seemed to drive the characters, who exhibit extreme behavior, from selfless to evil. Yet, by the end, readers will understand the old Hebrew saying, “No matter how dark the tapestry God weaves for us, there’s always a thread of grace.”Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

From Booklist
Italian citizens saved more than 43,000 Jews during the last 20 months of World War II. Russell has transmuted this little-known history into an expansive, well-researched, and compelling novel. As the story opens, the mountainous region of northwest Italy has been relatively untouched by WWII, and even Jews have been safe. When Italy breaks with Germany in 1943 and pulls out of southern France, thousands of Jewish refugees cross the mountains in search of safety. But the German occupation of Italy poses a new threat. Even with the list that's provided, it can be hard to keep track of all the characters--Catholics and Jews, priests and rabbis, Germans and Italians, old and young, Nazis and Resistance fighters. But Russell is good at presenting the human story while never using the war merely as a backdrop for personal dramas. In fact, to mirror the arbitrary nature of survival during wartime, she has said that she flipped a coin to determine who among her characters would live and who would die. Mary Ellen Quinn
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"It is September 8, 1943, and fourteen-year-old Claudette Blum is learning Italian with a suitcase in her hand. She and her father are among the thousands of Jewish refugees scrambling over the Alps toward Italy, where they hope to be safe at last, now that the Italians have broken with Germany and made a separate peace with the Allies. The Blums will soon discover that Italy is anything but peaceful, as seemingly overnight it becomes an open battleground among the Nazis, the Allies, resistance fighters, Jews in hiding, and ordinary Italian civilians trying to survive." Mary Doria Russell sets her first historical novel against this dramatic background, tracing the lives of a handful of characters - a charismatic Italian resistance leader, a priest, an Italian rabbi's family, a disillusioned German doctor. Through them, she tells the little-known but true story of the vast underground effort of the Italian citizens who saved the lives of 43,000 Jews during the final phase of the war. The result of five years of meticulous research, A Thread of Grace is a novel of ideas and history.

SYNOPSIS

Set in Italy during the dramatic finale of World War II, this new novel is the first in seven years by the bestselling author of The Sparrow and Children of God.

It is September 8, 1943, and fourteen-year-old Claudette Blum is learning Italian with a suitcase in her hand. She and her father are among the thousands of Jewish refugees scrambling over the Alps toward Italy, where they hope to be safe at last, now that the Italians have broken with Germany and made a separate peace with the Allies. The Blums will soon discover that Italy is anything but peaceful, as it becomes overnight an open battleground among the Nazis, the Allies, resistance fighters, Jews in hiding, and ordinary Italian civilians trying to survive.

Mary Doria Russell sets her first historical novel against this dramatic background, tracing the lives of a handful of fascinating characters. Through them, she tells the little-known but true story of the network of Italian citizens who saved the lives of forty-three thousand Jews during the war’s final phase. The result of five years of meticulous research, A Thread of Grace is an ambitious, engrossing novel of ideas, history, and marvelous characters that will please Russell’s many fans and earn her even more.


From the Hardcover edition.

FROM THE CRITICS

Robert MacNeil - The Washington Post

I sense a tension in this writer, who seems torn between a desire to linger and explore her interesting creations more fully and a need to keep the action racing forward. The action wins. An addictive page-turner, A Thread of Grace satisfies our need to be reminded of how warmly inspiring humanity can be when it is moved to be generous, tolerant and forgiving.

Publishers Weekly

Busy, noisy and heartfelt, this sprawling novel by Russell-a striking departure from her previous two acclaimed SF thrillers, The Sparrow and Children of God-chronicles the Italian resistance to the Germans during the last two years of WWII. Three cultures mingle uneasily in Porto Sant'Andrea on the Ligurian coast of northwest Italy-the Italian Jews of the village, headed by the chief rabbi Iacopo Soncini; the Italian Catholics, like Sant'Andrea's priest Don Osvaldo Tomitz, who befriend and shelter the Jews; and the occupying Germans invited by Mussolini's crumbling regime. In the last camp is the drunken, tubercular Nazi deserter, Doktor Schramm, a broken man who confesses to Don Osvaldo that while working in state hospitals and Auschwitz, he was responsible for murdering 91,867 people. Meanwhile, Jewish refugees in southern France, including Albert Blum and his teenage daughter, Claudette, are fleeing across the Alps to Italy, hoping to find sanctuary there. Russell pursues numerous narrative threads, including the Blums' perilous flight over the mountains; Italian Jew Renzo Leoni's personal coming to terms with his participation in the Dolo hospital bombing during the Abyssinian campaign in 1935; the dangerous frenzy of the Italian partisans; and the bloody-mindedness of German officers resolved to carry out Hitler's murderous racial policy despite mounting evidence of its futility. The action moves swiftly, with impressive authority, jostling dialogue, vibrant personalities and meticulous, unexpected historical detail. The intensity and intimacy of Russell's storytelling, her sharp character writing and fierce sense of humor bring fresh immediacy to this riveting WWII saga. Agent, Jane Dystel. (Feb. 1) Forecast: This is a worthy successor to high-caliber, crowd-pleasing WWII novels like Corelli's Mandolin or The English Patient. With the publisher firmly behind it-Russell will embark on a 12-city author tour-expect substantial sales. Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

In 1943, teenaged Claudette Blum scales the Alps with her father, hoping to find sanctuary in Italy. It took the author of the highly regarded The Sparrow five years to research this book, which highlights the network of Italians who saved 43,000 Jewish lives during World War II. With a 12-city author tour. Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews