AN OBSERVER BOOK OF THE YEAR

'Origo's diaries, trenchantly and pithily written, are a glory' Spectator

'Many marvellously human touches in these pages provide vivid authenticity' Daily Telegraph

Iris Origo never quite felt she belonged anywhere. One of the twentieth century's great diarists, she was born in England in 1902, moving between Ireland, Italy and America as a child. It was only when she married an Italian man that she came to rest in one country. Fifteen years later, that country would be at war with her own.

The gripping precursor to War in Val d'Orcia, her bestselling classic diary, A Chill in the Air is Origo's devastating account of how Italy stumbled into conflict in 1940. Through her connections with all of society - from the peasants on her estate to the US ambassador - she uncovers the turmoil, the danger, and the grim absurdities the country faced as war became more and more inevitable.

The bestselling diaries of WWII in Tuscany, with a new introduction by writer and social historian Virginia Nicholson, and stunning rediscovered photographsAt the height of the Second World War, Italy was being torn apart by German armies, civil war, and the eventual Allied invasion. In a corner of Tuscany, one woman - born in England, married to an Italian - kept a record of daily life in a country at war. Iris Origo's compellingly powerful diary, War in Val d'Orcia, is the spare and vivid account of what happened when a peaceful farming valley became a battleground. At great personal risk, the Origos gave food and shelter to partisans, deserters and refugees. They took in evacuees, and as the front drew closer they faced the knowledge that the lives of thirty-two small children depended on them. Origo writes with sensitivity and generosity, and a story emerges of human acts of heroism and compassion, and the devastation that war can bring.

This extraordinary re-creation of the life of a medieval Italian merchant, Francesco di Marco Datini, is one of the greatest historical portraits written in the twentieth century. Drawing on an astonishing cache of letters unearthed centuries after Datini's death, it reveals to us a shrewd, enterprising, anxious man, as he makes deals, furnishes his sumptuous house, buys silks for his outspoken young wife and broods on his legacy. It is an unequalled source of knowledge about the texture of daily life in the small, earthy, violent, striving world of fourteenth-century Tuscany. 'Datini has now probably become most intimately accessible figure of the later Middle Ages ... brilliant and intricate' The Times 'As a picture of Tuscany before the dawn of the Renaissance it is a complement to The Decameron' Sunday Times