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Title: Red Stars

Author: Davide Morosinotto

Translator: Denise Muir

Illustrator:

Publisher: Pushkin Press

Date Published: 2020

Format: Paperback

Genre: History

Book Category: Fiction

Age Range: 12+

Original Title: First published in Italian as La Sfolgorante luce di due stelle rosse, Mondadori, Milan, Italy, 2017

Country of Origin: Italy

Red Stars

by Davide Morosinotto
Age Range: 12+

When Hitler’s Germany declares war on the Soviet Union in 1941, twelve-year-old twins Viktor and Nadya are hurriedly evacuated from their home in the city of Leningrad. Their parents emphasise that they must stay together and look after each other. However, amid the chaos of the evacuation the twins are separated and assigned to different trains – Nadya on train 76 and Viktor on train 77.

This sets the scene for Nadya and Viktor to each record their own extraordinary adventures in notebooks given to them by their father. While Nadya’s train breaks down, Viktor ends up on a collective farm in the Ural Mountains where he is told that his sister’s train has been destroyed. Viktor is convinced Nadya is still alive, believing, because of their special bond, that he would know if she had died.

Nadya and her companions continue on foot, eventually joining a group of Soviet sailors in a fortress on the island of Oreshek. In his quest to find his sister, Viktor suffers setbacks and finds himself in a labour camp where the conditions are harsh. Both twins survive extreme hunger and cold, and with enemy forces ever-present, death is around every corner but their sheer determination to find each other and return home spurs them on no matter how many impossible obstacles are put in their way.

This extraordinarily gripping novel by Italian author Davide Morosinotto, with a stunning translation by Denise Muir, is both original and complex. It cleverly combines the history of the second world war, in particular, the siege of Leningrad, in the parallel stories of each twin as they relate what has happened to them together with an insight into the oppressive surveillance of the Soviet Union at the end of the war in 1946. This additional layer to the story shows Col. Smirnov of the Secret Police providing meticulous handwritten annotated notes throughout as he collates the diaries which will be used as evidence against the twins. It is up to him to decide their guilt or innocence regarding charges brought about by the events recounted within them.

Accompanying the diary entries – one written in black ink and one in red, there are maps, propaganda posters and photographs which all give a real impression of a documentary novel.

Morosinotto explains in an Author’s Note at the back of the book “This is a quasi-historical novel, in that some characters who were real people and others whom I made up; it mentions truths so far-fetched they seem pretend and pretences so real they could have taken place.” A superb masterpiece of storytelling, Red Stars is an incredibly powerful and poignant novel.

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