True Enemy

Life is good for the Renaldi family in 1939. Emilio and his wife Francesca run a popular chippy on Leith Walk in Edinburgh. Lena is making top grades at Holy Cross Academy and her older brother Angelo has a girlfriend and a new job in the offing, while youngest Joe is obsessed only with football. All this will change though with the coming of war and Italy's alliance with Nazi Germany. Rampaging mobs will wreck Italian businesses across Britain as mass arrests under Churchill's infamous edict "Collar the lot" tear innocent families apart. True Enemy is the story of one family caught up in the brutal round-up of "enemy aliens" and later the tragic sinking of the converted transport ship SS Arandora Star - an event that brought unendurable grief but also forced a change in policy on wartime internment of foreign nationals. James Killgore is an Edinburgh-based writer and has three published novels: Buck Falaya (adult), The Passage (young adult) and Soldier's Game (age 9-11), which was shortlisted for the Scottish Children's Book Awards.