Early One Morning by Virginia Baily review – wartime drama in Rome’s Jewish ghetto

The unofficial adoption of a Jewish child – and all that follows – forms the centre of this often enchanting second novel

Virginia Baily’s second novel, the follow-up to the prizewinning Africa Junction, begins on the dangerous streets of the Jewish ghetto in Rome in 1943, but Chiara Ravello’s unofficial adoption of an endangered Jewish child is just the beginning of a story that stretches from Italy to Wales, and from the 1940s to the 1970s.

The wartime sections are by far the most alive, and I wish Baily had lingered among the “rubble” of the occupied city for longer. But it’s the legacy of Chiara’s act of kindness that lies at the heart of the story – what she sacrificed for the child, how much she loved him, and the subsequent damage he wreaked on her life and those of others close to him.

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