“In The Cipher, Genni Gunn brilliantly populates a little-known corner of the Second World War with unforgettable characters – Olivia, the haunting cipher-savant sent to Italy with Churchill’s Secret Army; Nino, an agent extracted from Mussolini’s war in Kenya, who leaves her secret, coded messages; and Bianca, glamorous as a silent-movie star. Interspersed with authentic spy documents from The Secret Agent’s Handbook and deftly woven with lies, disguises, cover stories, honeytraps and heartbreaking loss, past and present, this novel is electric in its shocks, seductive in its intrigue, thrilling in every finely tuned sentence. We choose our own futures, Bianca tells her daughter – but do we?” 

    —Merilyn Simonds, author of Refuge and Woman, Watching

“Genni Gunn has written a wonderful novel about love and death and torn loyalties – personal and national. The Cipher, which is deeply researched and beautifully structured, is about some forgotten heroes of the Second World War – Italian anti- fascists. Poignant and compelling.” 

    —Charlotte Gray, author of Passionate Mothers, Powerful Sons and The Massy Murders

 “With skill and compassion Genni Gunn uncovers the secret lives of her fascinating characters. Though silenced by their role in a panoramically rendered war, Olivia and Nino will continue to speak in your mind long after you have finished the final page of this book.” 

    — Jane Urquhart, author of The Stone Carvers and In Winter I Get Up AT Night

“Move over, le Carré. Genni Gunn knows that a training in secrecy and deceit infects everyone, including friends, families and even countries. The Cipher is a searing novel of deception and its consequences, of stifled love and lingering suspicion. In The Cipher, spies don’t come in from the cold.” 

    —Wayne Grady, author of The Good Father and Emancipation Day 

                                                                                               

September 8, 2024

The Cipher

by Genni Gunn

Winnipeg: Signature Editions, 2024

$22.95 / 9781773241425

Reviewed by Theo Dombrowski

Young Lovers, war’s chaos

“Ah, love, let us be true to one another,“ writes Matthew Arnold in his haunting poem,“Dover Beach.” His plea is urgent because the entire world, he grieves, is but “a darkling plain / Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, / Where ignorant armies clash by night.” 

From the ancient Greeks to modern times some of our most affecting writing has been about the yearning for love in a world riven by the “ignorant armies” of war. Works as diverse as Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, and, more recently, The Sorrow of War by Vietnamese novelist Bao Ninh are just a few that make art from this human tragedy.

In The Cipher, Vancouver writer Genni Gunn, like so many before her, writes of love battered by war. Given the nature of war, many of the conflicts in her storyline are not unexpected. Yet Gunn’s approach is distinctive in two key ways. First, hers is deeply personal: discovering in some papers of her long-deceased Italian father clues about his activities in the Second World War, she has created a chief character who, in some ways, as she says, she imagines to be her father. Further, in those same papers she found evidence that her father had been “recruited into Churchill’s Secret Army, the Special Operations Executive (SOE) to fight a clandestine, guerrilla war against the German Nazis and Italian Fascists.”

Likewise connected to the author’s own family background is the treatment of the comparatively little-known tangle of internecine conflicts in the northeast of Italy, both during and immediately following the war. The substantial body of research along with her imagined identification with her chief characters results in a novel that feels both authentic and illuminating… 

READ THE FULL REVIEW HERE

Writing novels for me has always been an engrossing, fascinating process, and my new novel The Cipher is no exception. In fact, it is probably the novel most close to my heart, because through it – and by this I don’t mean the research and process – I came a little closer to understanding my father, who died decades ago, when I was too young to ask him who he was.

During my childhood, my father had always been a mystery, weaving in and out of my life like a film star, in his convertible Alfa Romeo, dashing and handsome in his starched uniform. I recall him best, perhaps, as the father I’d seen in photographs taken before my birth, black-and-white photos, in fragments and brief glimpses. We knew nothing about his past, his wartime experiences, what drove him to spend hours alone reading in his study.

Then, in 2012, 40 years after my father’s death, I was visiting my mother in Ottawa, helping her move, and she suddenly produced a suitcase containing my father’s personal items. Some of these were puzzling: a British passport in which my father appeared above a fictitious name; a British Soldier’s Paybook, 96 letters written between he and my mother in 1943-44; various certificates attesting to and thanking him for his service with the Special Operations Executive and in No. 1 Special Force, in the “Cause of Freedom.”

READ THE FUILL BLOG HERE

The Cipher that was Genni Gunn’s father’s wartime past

In her research to discover her father’s wartime past, Genni Gunn made a stunning discovery: he was one of a handful of highly-trusted operatives in the Special Operations Executive, an covert Allied effort in World War II. As she tells us below, her research spawned her new novel The Cipher (Signature Editions): although, as you’ll read, the story didn’t come easily, at first.