The temptation to betray a secret is always there, always exhaling its hot intimate breath in your ear.
Mario Carità was the most sadistic of the SS torturers in Florence during the second world war. It was his job to extract secrets.
On the death of her father Zinnia St Aubyn finds a journal. The journal is written by an English sculptor living in Florence who has fallen in love with an Italian dancer and so refuses to leave Italy at the outbreak of war in 1940. He is soon forced to assume a false identity to avoid capture by the fascist authorities. He becomes Jewish, because Jews in Italy were forbidden to join the armed forces but were otherwise left relatively in peace. Until the Nazis arrived in 1943.
The journal will lead Zinnia back to Florence and into the web of her own closely guarded secret.
PST is about the relationship between secrets and identity – how we both gain and lose identity in relation to the secrets we protect or disclose. And it’s about the narrative bridges in life, the butterfly effect over time of one rash decision or moment of hesitation. .