Dad's War - Softcover

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Howard Reid is an award-winning film-maker, anthropologist and writer. Before completing his Ph.D. he lived for two years with hunter-gatherers in the Amazon basin, and as a film-maker he has spent several months with the Tuareg people of north Africa as well as undertaking many other assignments around the world. His previous books are In Search of the Immortals, about mummy cultures around the world, and Arthur the Dragon King, which traced the roots of the King Arthur legend back to the nomadic warrior peoples of central Asia.

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On 6 April 1943, Ian Reid, an officer in the Black Watch, was wounded and captured in North Africa and sent to an Italian prisoner-of-war camp. Five months later, as the Italians pulled out of the war and the Germans took over the camp, he escaped. So began a life-or-death game of hide and seek in the heart of the beautiful Italian countryside, living in barns, sleeping in ditches and desperate scavenging for food. He was recaptured - though heroically he was to escape from the Germans a total of five times and would later recall these exploits in a bestselling book in the 1950s.

Nearly sixty years later, film-maker Howard Reid set out to follow, literally, in his father's footsteps across Italy. From near Modena to Florence and through Chianti, Siena, Orvieto, on to Rome and beyond, he paints an intimate portrait of this extraordinary man and uncovers the haunting truth behind his escapades.

As Howard journeys through the real, modern Italy, he reflects on father-son relationships, and those deep but invisible scars left on successive generations by two world wars. Poignant, engrossing and beautifully written, this is a book for everyone who has ever asked (or wanted, too late, to ask) the question 'What did you do in the war, Dad?'.