In our weekly office meeting today, we discussed the fact that we will soon be needing a reprint of the wonderful book War in Val D’Orcia, by Iris Origo – a captivating diary in which Iris recounts a year of wartime occupation living on her Tuscan estate, La Foce.  She never left her estate, hiding orphans and prisoners of war, and kept writing her diary (often in secret, hiding the diary in the garden) even when the Germans took over her land.

We talked about whether we should give the reprint a new look, to match the style of other titles on our A&B classics list like Three Houses, by Angela Thirkell.  But the consensus was that there was little  sense to move away from the beautiful image of La Foce – a setting so intrinsic to the book. And so, we have decided not to change a thing.

But you always learn something new when you revisit a classic title, and today we discovered that Val ‘D’Orcia is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.  I’ve been wanting to visit La Foce ever since reading War in Val D’Orcia, and now I have another good reason to explore that entire beautiful region of Italy…

Chiara Priorelli, Publicity & Online Marketing Manager