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Liguria, Italy. Summer 1978.
The Kentish family are on holiday in idyllic medieval village of Colletta. Sixteen-year-old Sebastian is smitten with Rosetta, the hotel cleaner and waitress, much to his snobbish mother's dismay, while his younger brother and their fellow hotel guests are obsessed by the World Cup, hosted by the murderous military junta in Argentina.
The boys' father, Peter Kentish, has very different motivations for the trip. An investigative journalist, he spends much of his time interviewing a mysterious American, a disillusioned ex-CIA agent.
As Kentish uncovers the shocking extent of Operation Gladio, he delves into some of Italy's darkest secrets. Darker still is the involvement of the USA. Those complicit will do anything to ensure that the truth is buried. For good.
What did I think?
I really enjoyed my virtual trip to 1970s Italy in Bruno Noble's tense and enthralling novel, The Colletta Cassettes.
The Kentish family's visit to Colletta is both business and pleasure. Peter Kentish has come to interview an ex-CIA agent and he's brought his wife and sons along for a holiday. The story is set in the summer of 1978 during the World Cup in Argentina. As a football fan, I loved this layer of the story and I was too young at the time to remember that England had failed to qualify. The excitement and atmosphere of people gathered round a small TV to watch the match made me feel as if I was actually there with them.
While Peter is interviewing a whistleblower on his trusty cassette recorder, his 16 year old son Sebastian is falling in love with a girl working at the the hotel. The two strands of the story are dark and light so they balance everything out nicely. Reading about Operation Gladio is very disturbing and it's even more mind-blowing that it is actually true; it's well worth doing further research if, like me, you've never heard of it.
It's very clever of Bruno Noble to balance such a heavy storyline with romance, family and sport as I think I would have found the intelligence storyline going a bit over my head. Even the identity of the ex-agent has another layer to it that is surprisingly poignant.
Intelligent, atmospheric and entertaining, The Colletta Cassettes is a riveting and intriguing novel that is both a coming of age romance and a spy thriller inspired by real events. It's well worth a read.
I received a gifted paperback to read and review for the blog tour and this is my honest and unbiased opinion.
Purchase link: https://amzn.to/4oO4JUj
About the author:
Bruno Noble study Philosophy and French literature at Southampton University. A circuitous route selling advertising space in financial magazines took him to the City where, amongst other things, he wrote markets and investment reports while impatient to write a novel. His first, ‘A Thing of the Moment’, was published by Unbound in 2018, and his second, ‘The Colletta Cassettes’, was published by Indie Novella in 2022 before being re-published by Inkspot Publishing in 2025.
Having enjoyed working collaboratively with other writers when he joined the Collier Street Fiction Group in 2021, Bruno started a part-time (two-year) Creative Writing M.A. at Birkbeck University in 2024.
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