Edda Mussolini

Get in the xigxag app
This book is not purchasable in your country. Please select another book.
Pre-order Buy Now £{{ price }}
How does xigxag pricing work?

Listen to a sample

What to expect

Brought to you by Penguin.

Edda Mussolini was Benito's favourite daughter: spoilt, venal, uneducated but clever, faithless but flamboyant, a brilliant diplomat, wild but brave, and ultimately strong and loyal.

She was her father's confidante during the 20 years of Fascist rule, acting as envoy to both Germany and Britain, and playing a part in steering Italy to join forces with Hitler. From her early twenties she was effectively first lady of Italy. She married Galeazzo Ciano, who would become the youngest Foreign Secretary in Italian history, and they were the most celebrated and glamorous couple in elegant, vulgar Roman fascist society.

Their fortunes turned in 1943, when Ciano voted against Mussolini in a plot to bring him down, and his father-in-law did not forgive him. In a dramatic story that takes in hidden diaries, her father's fall and her husband's execution, an escape into Switzerland and a period in exile, we come to know a complicated, bold and determined woman who emerges not just as a witness but as a key player in some of the twentieth century's defining moments. And we see Fascist Italy with all its glamour, decadence and political intrigue, and the turbulence before its violent end.

© Caroline Moorehead 2022 (P) Penguin Audio 2022

Critics Review

  • It’s testament to Moorehead’s precise, empathic prose that Edda emerges not as the Duce’s devilish scion, but as a wounded, fragile being… It makes for a profoundly satisfying, albeit wistful, read and – give the recent victory of Giorgia Meloni in the Italian elections – a worryingly relevant one

    Guardian

  • Interesting and original… Moorehead is a fine writer and a conscientious historian

    Spectator

  • [Moorehead] brilliantly sketches the background of Mussolini and his regime

    LIterary Review

  • Painstakingly researched and vividly told, this engrossing history turns the spotlight on the deeply conflicted Edda Mussolini, brilliantly balancing the big picture with a wealth of telling detail

    CLARE MULLEY, author of The Women Who Flew for Hitler

  • Caroline Moorehead writes with her characteristic elegance, eye for detail and authoritative knowledge about a monster and a survivor. The story of Mussolini’s glamorous daughter is certainly a fascinating one

    MIRANDA SEYMOUR, author of I Used to Live Here Once

More from the same

Narrator

Subscribe to our newsletter

Sign up to get tailored content recommendations, product updates and info on new releases. Your data is your own: we commit to protect your data and respect your privacy.