This image is the cover for the book Art of Waiting

Art of Waiting

This “profoundly moving novel” follows the life of an Italian soldier from Venice to Russia and back in “a gripping, richly evocative” epic of WWII (Alex Preston).

Russia, 1943. Aldo Gardini, a conscripted soldier in Mussolini’s army, has been taken prisoner. In the brutal Russian POW camp, he is consumed with a desire for vengeance—not against the Russian guards, but against his father’s murderer back home. But then he meets a girl from Leningrad through the barbed wire. When Katerina sees the starving prisoner, she reaches her hand through the wire to hand him a crust of bread. It is an unexpected kindness that Aldo will never forget.

The memory of Katrina keeps Aldo alive on his long journey home. But back in Venice, Aldo is divided between his love for the girl who saved his life, his unfulfilled desire to seek justice for his father. Reaching from pre-war Venice and Leningrad through the horrors of the Second World War and beyond, The Art of Waiting is a sweeping narrative of love and loss, brutality and hope for redemption.

Christopher Jory

Christopher Jory was born in 1968 in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. He spent his early childhood in Barbados, Venezuela and finally Oxfordshire. He did a degree in English Literature and Philosophy at Leicester University and then worked as an English teacher for the British Council and other organisations in Italy, Spain, Crete, Brazil and Venezuela. He is currently a Publisher at Cambridge University Press. His first book, Lost in the Flames (Troubadour, 2011), was a moving account of RAF Bomber Command airmen and their families.

Polygon