Saving Lucia
ANNA VAUGHT
(BLUEMOOSE books, 220 PP, £9.99)
Tablet bookshop price £8.99 • Tel 020 7799 4064

The inspiration for Anna Vaught’s intelligent new novel comes from the historical coincidence that, at some stage during the mid-twentieth century, Lucia Joyce, daughter of the novelist James Joyce, found herself confined in the same psychiatric hospital as Lady Violet Gibson, the Anglo-Irish aristocrat and convert to Catholicism who attempted to murder Benito Mussolini. There is no historical evidence that the two women ever met, but this novel begins from the entirely reasonable conjecture that they may have known one another.

One major question raised by the book is how we can know whether or not someone is mad. Violet Gibson shot and wounded Mussolini in 1926, removing a chunk of his nose but leaving him otherwise unscathed. As a result, she was beaten by a mob, imprisoned in Rome, and then deported to Britain, where she lived out her days at St Andrew’s Hospital in Northampton.