Glenn Haybittle

"The last task of love is to protect remembrance." Venice 1938. Fausto's ambition is to be a film star. Meanwhile he works for the fascist secret police. Elisabetta is being taught how to paint using the techniques of the old masters by her father. And, to her horror, she is being courted by the head of the fascist secret police in Venice. Marcello works in his Jewish family's art supplies shop where he meets Elisabetta and becomes besotted by her. He moves about Venice in his beloved gondola. Three young people whose lives have barely begun when war breaks out and whose integrity and courage will be tested in very different ways when the Nazis arrive in Venice. A missing painting of Elisabetta's will come to hold the key of a pivotal mystery.

Max and Ada, ten-year-old neighbours, are engrossed in composing a book of spells in a tree house in Paris when the Nazis arrive to occupy the city. Max, the child of a rape and abandoned by his mother, is in foster care; Ada is Jewish. Almost fifty years later Max, the black sheep of the family, summons his grandson to tell him the story of those years in Paris and reveal a guilty secret that has eaten away at him. His mind is now set on digging up the past and he wants Mark to accompany him across the English Channel. His dying wish is to shed light on the two missing women in his life: Ada and his mother. Mark though is struggling with his own existential crisis. There is a missing woman in his life too. A deftly accomplished tightrope act of pathos and humour, The Tree House is a bewitching novel of loss and restitution, heritage and the hereafter.