JCO Book Club

Beneath a Scarlet Sky by Mark Sullivan follows Pino Lella, a music-loving Milanese teenager whose ordinary life ends when Allied bombs destroy his family's home. He guides Jewish refugees on foot over the Alps, then, at his parents' urging, enlists in the German army to dodge the draft and lands as the personal driver to a senior Nazi general, quietly feeding what he sees to the Italian resistance. Sullivan tells it as a fast, plain-spoken adventure, and on the strength of that story it became a word-of-mouth bestseller. It has also drawn real debate. Marketed as based on a true story, the book has been challenged by readers and historians over how much of it actually happened, from the identity of the general to the geography of that mountain crossing. That tension, between a gripping tale and a contested record, may make an interesting topic of discussion: what do we…