About The Book

Chosen as Book of the Year in London by both the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail, Kate Caterina is a passionate love story and a heartbreaking saga of a family torn apart by war, situated against a canvas of Italy during World War II. Brilliantly linking the atmosphere of war-torn Europe and a palpable love for Italy and its people, Rivière tells the story of Kate Fenn, a great English beauty who marries a young left-wing Italian doctor and moves to Tuscany, where she relishes the countryside splendor and the strong ties her new family has. She changes her name to Kate Caterina to unite her internationally conflicted sides, but soon finds herself isolated inside Nazi-Fascist Europe with a family completely torn apart by politics.

Captivating from the first pages to the unforgettable end, Kate Caterina is the story of a family and a nation traumatized, of loyalty and betrayal, and of Caterina’s effort to retain an inner freedom in a country at war.

Praise

“A masterpiece of a tour through Mussolini’s Italy . . . If the mark of a great novel is that readers will miss the characters and mourn the book’s ending, then Rivi’re’s latest work definitely qualifies.” –Scott Bernard Nelson, The Boston Globe

“Kate Caterina belongs in the great tradition of the European novel: it has breadth of outlook and bristles with political ideas. At its best, it reminds one of Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s The Leopard–and there can be no higher comparison.” –The Sunday Telegraph

“[The] brilliance of the central characterizations, together with the diverse places of the heart and mind which are explored through them, is strong enough to make this novel a remarkable achievement.” –The Spectator