by
It is June 1940 and fifteen-year-old Olivia Baldini's idyllic English life is shattered as Britain declares war on Italy. With hyperthymesia, Olivia possesses an extraordinary ability to recall information with vivid detail, a gift that makes her invaluable to Churchill's secret sabotage army, the Special Operations Executive (SOE). Trained in nursing, coding, and espionage, Olivia is dispatched behind enemy lines in Italy, aiding partisans and resistance fighters. Nino Fabris, dreaming of world travel with the merchant marines, is thrust into the war when his ship is conscripted. Captured in North Africa and sent to a POW camp in Kenya, Nino seizes a chance for freedom by joining the SOE. In the chaos of war, Olivia and Nino's paths intertwine. The Cipher is a gripping tale of love, resilience, and the power of the truth -- and who you trust with it.
"In The Cipher, Vancouver writer Genni Gunn, like so many before her, writes of love battered by war. Given the nature of war, many of the conflicts in her storyline are not unexpected. Yet Gunn’s approach is distinctive in two key ways. First, hers is deeply personal: discovering in some papers of her long-deceased Italian father clues about his activities in the Second World War, she has created a chief character who, in some ways, as she says, she imagines to be her father. Further, in those same papers she found evidence that her father had been 'recruited into Churchill’s Secret Army, the Special Operations Executive (SOE) to fight a clandestine, guerrilla war against the German Nazis and Italian Fascists.' Likewise connected to the author’s own family background is the treatment of the comparatively little-known tangle of internecine conflicts in the northeast of Italy, both during and immediately following the war. The substantial body of research along with her imagined identification with her chief characters results in a novel that feels both authentic and illuminating."
