Petronella has never felt that her life was on course: from growing up in 1950s Yorkshire with her glamorous Italian mother Maddalena, to her failed marriage and struggles with her son. But when her father Alex dies, she finds a chest containing her mother's belongings and sets out on a path of discovery. She learns about her parents' first meeting, in wartime, when Maddalena was part of a partisan brigade in the mountains of Italy. Petronella makes the journey to Porto Romola and, helped by local historian Nando, pieces together not only her parents' story – including the hours they spent playing liar dice to while the time away between missions – but also her own, one that might include Nando.
"Gethin links present and past, the displayed and the concealed, fantasy and longing in this bittersweet tale... Compassionately imagined – Liar Dice is an engaging exploration of memory and identity."
Maria McCann
Rebecca Gethin lives on Dartmoor. Her first poetry collection, River is the Plural of Rain, was published by Oversteps Books in 2009 and she has read her poems both in London and Devon, on local radio and on television. She is currently a tutor of Creative Writing in a prison and occasionally runs workshops on the outside, too. Liar Dice is her first novel and was winner of the Cinnamon Press Novel Award 2010.