Friedrich Christian Delius Bildnis der Mutter als junge Frau (Portrait of Mother as a Young Woman) Rowohlt. Berlin Verlag, September 2006, 128 pp ISBN: 3-87134-556 It is Rome during the second world war, when Italy and Germany were still allies, and a heavily pregnant twenty-one-year-old woman is taking a leisurely walk across the city to attend a concert of Baroque music. Within the period of a single hour of his subject's life Friedrich Christian Delius portrays and explores an extraordinarily wide range of topics, geographical, historical and emotional. The exact date is January 1943 and the young woman in question is an uneducated but not unintelligent Protestant German who finds herself suddenly alone, though physically secure, in the shelter of the German Christian Deaconesses' Home in the heart of the Eternal City. Only recently married, she sees all her hopes of a settled family life shattered when her war-wounded husband is suddenly ordered to report for office duties with the German forces in North Africa. The story is imbued with a sense of waiting and walking: waiting for the baby to be born and her husband to return; walking, both literally and metaphorically, on her journey through life, relying on old strategies and finding new methods of coping with her unexpected and unwelcome situation. In his story Delius manages to cover personal disappointments, differences of outlook and temperament between Germans and Italians, Protestants and Catholics, the role of religious faith, significant moments in the course of three generations of family history, and much more. There are no full stops and no chapter divisions. This gives the writing a 'stream of consciousness' feel despite being narrated in the third person and makes the book difficult to put down, while its setting in a beautiful and comparatively unscathed Rome, admirably and accurately described, allows a consideration of the terrible effects of war without the horrific immediacy. There is extra interest for any reader with even the smallest curiosity about what life was like on 'the other side', but this is only one of many other bonuses in a book with an unusually attractive main character and a moving and satisfying end.