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She climbed up to the roof and gasped. Against a bright blue sky, the panorama unfolded before her, revealing buildings she would soon be able to identify: the churches of San Miniato and Santa Croce, the tower of Palazzo Vecchio, the green domed roof of the synagogue, the hills of Fiesole on the other side.
Most impressive of all was the Cathedral - the Duomo - directly in her line of vision. Puncturing the Florentine skyline, its famous cupola looked like a large terracotta umbrella standing at the centre of the city. It gave a focus, like the point of a painting from which the eye can move around but to which it constantly returns. But to look down made her dizzy...
It is the summer of 1966 and eighteen-year-old Cara accepts a job in Florence to get away from a difficult situation at home. By the autumn she has settled into her new life in the university quarter and her future looks bright. But during a significant night for her and her Italian lover, the river Arno bursts its banks, creating devastation and despair.
Cara’s mother Mary, left behind in Clerkenwell, can only watch and worry from afar.
Drawing on an intimate knowledge of the city she grew up in, Vanessa Nicolson has crafted a captivating story of women’s lives across three generations, tracing how the truths withheld in families can ripple through time, as a mother and daughter, twenty years apart, come unwittingly close to replicating each other’s destiny.
And what happens when, fifty years later, Cara’s own daughter, Laura, starts unpicking the threads in a web of lies…
Told with an acute sense of place and much historical detail, the story pivots around the catastrophic flood which attracted many hundreds of international volunteers – dubbed ‘Mud Angels’ by local journalists. They became symbols of humanity’s determination to help those afflicted by disaster and to value the reparative power of art.
This tale, with its twists of thwarted love and concealed sexuality, offers fresh insight into the daily lives of Fiorentini at a key time in the history of the city, while also providing, by contrast, a vivid picture of women’s lives among the Italian community in London’s grimy, post war Clerkenwell.
Angels of Mud is Vanessa Nicolson’s first novel. Her two memoirs, Have You Been Good? (Granta 2015) and The Truth Game (Quartet 2017) were published to acclaim.
She grew up in Florence and London, the daughter of an Italian mother and British father, and has worked as an art historian, curator and journalist. She lives in Sissinghurst, Kent.
