It is June 1940 and fifteen-year-old Olivia Baldini's idyllic English life is shattered as Britain declares war on Italy. With hyperthymesia, Olivia possesses an extraordinary ability to recall information with vivid detail, a gift that makes her invaluable to Churchill's secret sabotage army, the Special Operations Executive (SOE). Trained in nursing, coding, and espionage, Olivia is dispatched behind enemy lines in Italy, aiding partisans and resistance fighters.Nino Fabris, dreaming of world travel with the merchant marines, is thrust into the war when his ship is conscripted. Captured in North Africa and sent to a POW camp in Kenya, Nino seizes a chance for freedom by joining the SOE.In the chaos of war, Olivia and Nino's paths intertwine. The Cipher is a gripping tale of love, resilience, and the power of the truth -- and who you trust with it.

In Accidents, her third collection of poems, Genni Gunn takes us on a roller coaster ride through past and present in different continents, to explore the various upheavals that alter our lives. From her birthplace in Trieste, where she attempts to unravel the mysterious lives of her parents; to Vancouver with its urban alienation and attraction; to Burma, where disruptions are a way of life under the Generals. Along the way, she treats us to a sardonic and sometimes appalling history of masks, and of spontaneous combustion. Poem by poem, Gunn examines the emotional, political, and geological upheaval that inevitably shape us as family members, as lovers, and as citizens, and the humble talismans we carry as reminders of the past. Heartbreak and humour leaven and disrupt these poems in equal measure, as does love.

The stories in Permanent Tourists feature displaced characters loosely connected through a support group, all of them dealing with loss precipitated by an elusive father, husband or lover, by a wife's death, a lost child, sibling rivalries. Tourists in their own lives, these characters are often paralysed by emotional inertia and are fleeing to evade their responsibilities, their failed relationships, their own shortcomings. Within the unfamiliar, their problems resurface and they're forced to confront and re-examine them. Permanent Tourists presents physical, emotional and psychological tourists, all striving to delve more deeply into themselves, their friendships, their families, their love relationships, and ultimately, to spur themselves to action.

Tracks is a compilation of personal travel essays that range across three continents: from Italy, where Genni Gunn was born and spent her early years, to Canada and Mexico, and through Asia, where she has travelled many times, both reconnecting with her sister and witnessing the emergence of new political realities in Myanmar. While these are journeys into the new and unknown, they also trigger the inner journey to the realm of memory. These pieces dig deep into personal territory, exploring the bonds of an unusually peripatetic family.In the 1950s, Gunn's parents travelled within Italy, settling wherever Gunn's father's work took him. Their two young daughters were sent to live with relatives, Genni in southern Italy, her sister Ileana in northern Italy. The family was eventually reunited in Canada. Gunn's father was a mysterious presence -- much later she learned he was working with British Intelligence, but during her childhood all she knew was that he would disappear as suddenly as he had appeared. Indelibly marked by their unusual childhood, the sisters became wanderers themselves. While in some ways, their world shrank with the departure of their parents, in other ways, their imaginations were opened to new possibilities. Gunn explores some of those possibilities in this collection. An inveterate traveller, she questions the impulse behind the need to stay in motion, to always be the "other" in the world, while always seeking the home that never was.

When Vito Santoro's body is inadvertently unearthed by a demolition crew in Fregene, Italy, his siblings are thrown into turmoil, having been told by their sister Piera that Vito had fled to Argentina fifty years earlier after abandoning his wife and son. Piera, the self-proclaimed matriarch, locks herself in her room, refusing to speak to anyone but her Canadian nephew, David. Now scattered over three continents, the family members regroup in Italy to try to discover the truth. They all arrive rife with their own resentments and conflicting desires: Aldo, the successful barrister everyone leans on; Teresa, the angry, abandoned wife; Renato, who lost Teresa to his brother Vito; Mimi, the bitter, ironic baby of the family; Clarissa, the famous opera diva whose peripatetic life had her frequently leaving her son David in the care of Piera; and David, who reluctantly accompanies his mother to Italy to bury his long-lost uncle. Set against the countryside of Italy's Adriatic coast, Solitaria is a tale of longing and family honour, told from two points of view: Piera's and David's. With the unravelling of their stories, we glimpse a woman's growing awareness of her own capacity for self-delusion, and of the consequences of her actions on others, and a young man's awakening to the depth of his roots.