Based in the as-yet-untold story of Newfoundland soldiers in Italy during the Second World War, The Saltbox Olive is an evocative tale of the complex interactions between past and present told through one woman’s search for the truth of her family’s mysterious past.
When Caroline Fisher studied art in Florence in the mid-1990s, trying unsuccessfully to finagle a way to live there for the rest of her days, she was unaware of her family’s history in Italy—how her grandfather had travelled the same streets and railway lines she did, or how her great-uncle Arch lay buried in an unmarked grave somewhere in those mountains. And how could she, when her grandfather burned his brother’s letters after returning home from the war? When an olive tree arrives at Caroline’s front door, family secrets begin to unravel, sending her back to Italy to find answers.
The Saltbox Olive follows the wartime route of Arch, Tombstone, Slade, and Garl, members of the 166th British Army (Newfoundland) Artillery Regiment. After surviving the battles of the Sangro and Cassino, they are all but forgotten by British HQ. Left on their own in the mountains between Florence and Bologna, where war loses all semblance of logic, where their loyalties are tested, they encounter acts of brutality, revenge, and loneliness. As their stories weave into those of Caroline and others, she faces the truth of individual responsibility in wartime, and how both sins committed in times of duress as well as declarations of love can ripple outward for generations. The Saltbox Olive traces the connections of the past to the present and the conflict between the simple truths we desperately crave and life’s complex realities.
Praise for The Saltbox Olive:
"Angela Antle’s Saltbox Olive brings us Newfoundlanders in the second world war with such vividness we feel the mud splatter; smell the smoke and blood from exploding bombs; see the bridges tumbling skyward. Alive are all the terrors of the battlefield, but also the intimate, close hatred between two brothers, Archie and Garl, who bring to mind Steinbeck’s Cal and Aron in East of Eden, so intricately woven are their lives and fates, so unforgettable.
Saltbox Olive is rife with suspense and piercing, shrapnel-sharp prose, but it’s Antle’s characters who will haunt you long after you read, and read again.
This is a story for the contemporary moment, as war spreads around the globe like wildfire – it is the present in the past and vice versa - just as nightmarish and dangerous, now as then, to everything we hold dear - our humanity. Antle’s war is mesmeric and visionary."
- Lisa Moore
"On the surface, Angela Antle’s The Saltbox Olive is the story of two Newfoundland brothers who, desperate to leave an abusive home (and to be part of the excitement of defeating the Nazis), volunteer to fight in the Newfoundland Regiment and who are then deployed to England and then Italy. Read a little further, though, and it becomes a portrait of the role women played in WWII, not only as nurses, but as pilots and photographers and resistance fighters, and of how the totalitarian roots of conflict then are now different than now. Imagine Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, with its anti-Fascist themes and irrepressible plot, but told by a woman: Antle’s partisan Lucia is a little bit Maria and a little bit Pillar; her female war photographer Barbara channels Lee Miller. The Saltbox Olive is a dazzling, densely-woven story told in fragments. Its crisp, witty dialogue (with just a touch of the fantastic) creates the kind of muscular text one would expect from a career broadcast journalist, but is rare in a debut novel. Angela Antle is a powerful new voice in Canadian fiction, and with this work rockets to the top of a very short list of women writing authoritatively about war."
- Monica Kidd
"The Saltbox Olive is a novel that feels like a mosaic or a stained-glass window – bright shards of the Second World War experience from a variety of unexpected perspectives – that come together to form a vivid whole. This is an immersive, shining novel that took me to places I never expected to visit."
- Trudy J. Morgan-Cole
