The bestselling author of The Ruin of All Witches returns with a gripping vividly told journey
into his family's wartime past 'In this rich engrossing book Gaskill succeeds in his aim of
writing 'a story that in good conscience feels real'... As I finished his book I began to see
my own family's past through his glass mountain' - Ian Ellison Literary Review 'Gaskill's
account is as much about what cannot be known about the past as what can still be reconstructed
even as the last witnesses to the Second World War pass from sight... his ability to explore
the overgrown byways of history almost as a form of travel writing is again winningly on show
here' - James Owen The Sunday Times 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 World War. Yet The Glass Mountain is about more than war: it's a
haunting exploration of what it means to encounter the past and how we remember forget and
recover it. As he follows his uncle's path through dusty archives and the landscapes towns and
villages of present-day Italy Gaskill finds himself confronted by questions that go to the
heart of how we think about the people who came before us: Why do stories matter? How much of
the past can ever be true?
