style="overflow: hidden; color: #000000; background-color: #ffffff; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; border: medium none;">This is a quite appallingly painful book. It begins in 2006, with an old lady in the Italian town of Gorizia, near Trieste. Haya Tedeschi is sitting in a rocking chair with a red basket beside her, full of photographs, letters and diaries – evidence of multifarious human lives. Her intelligent mind is full of memories. And gradually, as these memories unfold, the horrors inflicted by the Nazis, the second world war, the massacres of countless Jews and others, comes before us. Except that they are not countless. One of the truly uncomfortable things about the many deaths in this book is that they are itemised (in an extraordinary 40-page section, Dasa Drndic lists the 9,000 names of the Jews who were deported from Italy between 1943 and 1945). Although this is fiction, it is also a deeply researched historical documentary.