The book
New York Times Editors’ Choice
Book Riot Best Book of 2025
Guardian Best Book of 2025
Irish Book of the Year 2025
In the final months of World War II, a clandestine group known as The Choir successfully smuggles thousands of escapees out of Nazi-occupied Rome via a secret route known as the Escape Line. When an unidentified airman falls wounded from the sky, The Choir is plunged into danger and the survival of the Escape Line itself is threatened.
The Escape Line’s collapse would leave thousands stranded. Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty, its architect and the acknowledged leader of The Choir, broods inside the Vatican, paralyzed by the perils of keeping his Roman underground railroad functioning. Meanwhile, SS Commander Paul Hauptmann has been tasked with destroying the entire operation, and the price of failure is high—his wife and children are under Gestapo lock-and-key in Berlin. Into this deliriously thrilling melee steps Contessa Giovanna Landini, a reckless, audacious, and magnetic member of the Italian Resistance who has the nerve to challenge Hauptmann’s authority.
Beautifully written and expertly crafted, The Ghosts of Rome is a historical suspense novel bursting with action, atmosphere, and unforgettable characters by one of contemporary fiction’s most acclaimed and beloved writers.
The author
Joseph O’Connor
Joseph O’Connor’s Star of the Sea was an international bestseller, a New York Times, Economist Notable Book of the Year, and a Sunday Times Number 1 bestseller. It won France’s Prix Millepages, Italy’s Premio Acerbi, the Irish Post Award for Fiction, the Nielsen Bookscan Golden Book Award, an American Library Association Award, the Hennessy/Sunday Tribune Hall of Fame Award, and the Prix Litteraire Zepter for European Novel of the Year. He is the author of nine novels and is the Inaugural Frank McCourt Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Limerick. Shadowplay was named Novel of the Year at the 2019 Irish Book Awards and was a finalist for the prestigious Costa Book Award.
Press
- May 2 2025
Kerry Group Best Irish Novel of the Year 2025 Shortlist
— Listowel Writers' Week - Mar 1 2025
“Unforgettable.”
— Winnipeg Free Press - Feb 9 2025
“Gorgeous.”
— The Toronto Star - Feb 5 2025
“A thrilling, suspenseful, page-turner.”
— The Literate Quilter - Feb 4 2025
“Dazzling.”
— The New York Times Book Review - Jan 31 2025
“A stellar piece of storytelling.”
— The Daily Mail