The Bridge at Locri - Mark Allen

It's 1963 and a group of young pacifists have signed up to change the world,�volunteering to build a small road bridge for a community near Locri, a town in�Calabria, southern Italy.These disparate characters begin as comrades working for a common cause,�yet their ideals are tested in arguments over the collective good versus the rights of the individual, while personal desires quickly create further schism.�The touch paper is lit when one of the volunteers, Italian heiress Isabella, who has affairs with two members of the group, disappears in an area notorious for�the presence of the 'Ndrangheta mafia. Instead of murder or kidnapping for ransom could there be a much simpler explanation?�The Bridge at Locri�is, on one level, a mystery novel, in which the mystery is approached from the different perspectives of six narrators. On another, it's a book which spans sixty years and charts the stories of the principal characters�who, after Locri, go back to their own countries, with the missing but ever-present Isabella�looming over all their lives. This elegant page-turning novel draws you into a wider view, offering a�panorama of six decades of our history brought to us by the voices of intelligent, passionate and flawed characters from different corners of the world:�Bosnia, East Germany, Colombia, Australia, Italy, Malawi and England.