Joanna Scott's eighth book takes place on the Italian island of Elba during World War II. Warm June days and pleasant surroundings are set against the machinery of war — the hate and confusion, the bodies, the rapes of young girls and the burnings, lootings, and betrayals — all filtered through the slow, Mediterranean heat and the lush laziness of vineyard life. In the novel, a young Italian girl and her wealthy family take in a wounded Senegalese soldier while the Allied forces liberate the small island from German occupation. Joanna Scott, a prolific writer, a 1997 Pulitzer prize finalist for her novel Manikin, writes about a big subject (what could be bigger than war?) with originality and range, so why is it that you probably have never heard of her?

"The Allied forces moved through Southern Italy. War is war and in the midst of it anything goes. If anything goes, the logical connection between cause and consequence is broken. What happens happens by accident." Scott is interested in ideas, in the life of the mind (one reason she gets stashed away in the "critical darlings" pile). This is not a sweeping war epic, but a slow, still examination of the surreal timeline of war and the effects both during and afterwards on its participants. There is Adriana Nardi, an almost eleven-year-old girl, who is also Mrs. Rundel in the present day, seventy and having difficulty breathing on her daily commute into New York City; there is also Amdu Diop, a young frightened soldier on the ground, on the run from witnessing the rape and murder of a young girl. Amdu tries to hold on to his identity as a handsome doctor-to-be, a favorite son in his native Senegal, but Amdu is a solider who would trade his place in heaven for food; Adriana is a young girl stuffed in a cabinet by her mother to protect her during the fighting, but she is also Mrs. Rundel who tries to hold on to memories of the few days during the Liberation when she took care of Amdu. In these hollows and darknesses of their momentarily intertwined lives memories infiltrate, seep, flood, and fill. We survive, Scott is telling us, crouched in the corner of our minds, but it is through other people, through accidental encounters, that our lives finally have meaning.

We read novels for direct access to other peoples' thoughts, something we never get in life, a logical outline of the interior life. And Scott really gets this, hits all the right notes. People at the height of their wartime innocence and ignorance are captured in long musing sentences. When Adrianna is stuffed in the closet, she is a young girl hungry for experience, hungry to be someone who no longer is sheltered like a baby. "Deep inside her growing body, inside the cabinet, inside the walls of La Chiatta, she let herself consider what could happen. She could guess that it had to do with the advantages of strength over the stupidity of innocence. Adriana Nardi wasn't stupid. She'd always considered herself exceptionally knowledgeable and didn't find it difficult to surmise at least a part of the truth from which she was being protected. It had to do with young girls and soldiers and how, if a girl's growing body was too little for their pleasure, they had to make it bigger. Even as she was wishing to fit more comfortably into the cramped space of the cabinet, she imagined expanding like a balloon. She thought about how the soldiers would make this happen." Scott's prose is dense and poetic, which may be another reason why she is not more well known. She fills the consciousness of her characters right to the rim and then allows us a glimpse beyond their ken, allows us the pleasure and privilege of seeing the design of their lives as well as the bewildering torn-up present.

This is a novel to read slowly, one where you have look up now and then and allow the descriptions of olives and oranges, pale green grapes, rubbing copper pots with wood ash and lemon juice, freshly painted shutters on a deserted street, the smell of burning hair, the pull of smoke in the lungs to settle in your mind. Although the end of Liberation left a little to be desired, there was enough for the head and the heart in the rest of the novel and enough echoes of Virginia Woolf in the prose to make it definitely worth a quiet, pause-filled read. Joanna Scott's prolific body of work is an intellectual and artistic gift and this novel should gather more readers to her. Her big subjects and the fine focus of her writing make it worth a plunge into her world.

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