The Bridge at Locri — Mark Allen

It's 1963 and a group of young pacifists have signed up as volunteers 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? This is, on one level, a mystery novel, in which the mystery is approached from the different perspectives of five narrators. It is also a book which spans sixty years and charts the stories of the principal characters, who, after Locri, go back to their own countries - England, East Germany, Bosnia, Colombia and Australia - with the missing but ever-present Isabella looming over their lives.