DIVIDED BY WAR. UNITED BY MUSIC. ENDANGERED BY PASSION. When bon vivant Italian opera star-turned-pilot Pietro is shot down during World War II, he nearly loses his life. Worse, he's lost his passion for music and is close to losing his sanity in a soul-crushing prisoner-of-war camp in South Africa when he meets Iris. He has a vision of a love worth dying for-worth living for-and realizes he must find his voice if he ever hopes to find her again. Iris's dreams are at stake when she meets Pietro. All she wants is for her brother to come home alive from the war and to fulfill her destiny as a costume designer in Hollywood. But this spirited redhead's life turns upside down as her eyes meet Pietro's through the cage of his prison. The world may be at stake, but so is her heart. Their secretive and daring courtship raises the suspicions of the bully who runs the camp, a scarred and damaged tyrant who once dated Iris. Consummating the couple's almost mystical connection will mean crossing the barbed wire, risking the deadly charge of treason and confronting their worst fears. Inspired by a true story, WAR SERENADE is compelling, heart-wrenching, sometimes funny and always dramatic as it celebrates the endurance of the human spirit, the evolution of rich friendships, and love's triumph against impossible odds. "Jill Wallace has penned a love story for the ages, rich with detail and well-drawn characters. Fans of World War II romance are going to fall in love with this author." - Roxanne St. Claire, New York Times bestselling author "I feel like I just lost my best friends now that I finished reading this incredible story of World War II history and romance. This book reminded me of The Thorn Birds, one of my all-time favorite novels, and I know this fast-paced, moving story will soon be a blockbuster movie. ... Author Jill Wallace writes prose as poetry." - Journalist Debra Shannon

After completing a tour of duty (thirty-five missions) in B-17s, Bert Stiles transferred to a fighter squadron. Just four months later he was killed in action on an escort mission to Hanover, Germany, on November 26, 1944. Stiles’ book was written in the period between his two tours. Serenade to the Big Bird portrays the tragedy of war, and specifically the loss to the world of a fine, sensitive, talented writer who had only a short time to prove his merit. He died at twenty-three.

Inspired by real events this is a sweeping epic set in South Africa during WWII. An unlikely but true love story about an Italian opera star-turned-pilot shot down and captured and sent to a soul-crushing POW in Pietermartzburg and a local, spirited redhead, who has big dreams of becoming a fashion designer and a brother on the opposite side of the war. Their lives turn upside down as their eyes meet through the cage of his prison. He must find his voice if he ever hopes to find her again and she must risk everything to follow her heart. War Serenade is compelling, heart-wrenching, sometimes funny and always dramatic as it celebrates the endurance of the human spirit, the evolution of rich friendships and love's triumph against impossible odds.

Pietro Saltamachio is on top of the world as a bon vivant Italian opera star until he's forced to fly planes for his country in World War II. Shot down, captured and confined in an Allied POW camp in South Africa, though Pietro' injuries mend, his spirit remains broken. He's lost his passion for music and has nothing left to live for—until he sees a redheaded angel through the razor barrier. Iris Fuller dreams of pursuing a career across the sea, but she's doing her bit for the Allied war effort by volunteering as a lowly nurse’s aide. Thoroughly reluctant to mingle with the enemy, she’s instructed to inoculate prisoners at the nearby camp. Iris is entirely unprepared for the dark-haired prisoner’s mesmerizing stare to set her world on fire. That brief encounter begets Pietro's urge to find his voice. But the lengths he must go to triumph over the camp's sadistic leader and win Iris's love, seem beyond human endurance ... even as Iris, desperate for word of her brother's fate in the war, can't imagine loving an enemy from the country that could be responsible for his death. Their desperate longing drives them toward a secret rendezvous, and the dangers multiply. If they are caught, Pietro faces death for escape; Iris, charges of treason. Inspired by a true story, War Serenade is compelling, heart-wrenching, sometimes funny and always dramatic as it celebrates the endurance of the human spirit, the evolution of rich friendships, and love’s triumph against impossible odds. War Serenade, is a true-story-inspired, ultimately feel-good novel that’s won multiple awards including: Winner for Historical Fiction 2018 - Online book club; Best First Book in Golden Quill Contest 2019; was a finalist in The Independent Author Network for Outstanding Fiction in 2018 and many others. The audio version won N’Dtale’s Rone Award in 2020. The print copy, e-book, and audio book are all available from the Amazon Bookstore.

DIVIDED BY WAR. UNITED BY MUSIC. ENDANGERED BY PASSION. When bon vivant Italian opera star-turned-pilot Pietro is shot down during World War II, he nearly loses his life. Worse, he's lost his passion for music and is close to losing his sanity in a soul-crushing prisoner-of-war camp in South Africa when he meets Iris. He has a vision of a love worth dying for-worth living for-and realizes he must find his voice if he ever hopes to find her again. Iris's dreams are at stake when she meets Pietro. All she wants is for her brother to come home alive from the war and to fulfill her destiny as a costume designer in Hollywood. But this spirited redhead's life turns upside down as her eyes meet Pietro's through the cage of his prison. The world may be at stake, but so is her heart. Their secretive and daring courtship raises the suspicions of the bully who runs the camp, a scarred and damaged tyrant who once dated Iris. Consummating the couple's almost mystical connection will mean crossing the barbed wire, risking the deadly charge of treason and confronting their worst fears. Inspired by a true story, WAR SERENADE is compelling, heart-wrenching, sometimes funny and always dramatic as it celebrates the endurance of the human spirit, the evolution of rich friendships, and love's triumph against impossible odds. "Jill Wallace has penned a love story for the ages, rich with detail and well-drawn characters. Fans of World War II romance are going to fall in love with this author." - Roxanne St. Claire, New York Times bestselling author "I feel like I just lost my best friends now that I finished reading this incredible story of World War II history and romance. This book reminded me of The Thorn Birds, one of my all-time favorite novels, and I know this fast-paced, moving story will soon be a blockbuster movie. ... Author Jill Wallace writes prose as poetry" - Journalist Debra Shannon

The third book in the wartime series continuing from Tuesday’s War and Charlie’s War. The war’s over. Charlie Bassett is one of England’s brave young survivors. Haunted by one woman’s smile and by his wartime adventures, he finally returns back home to try to pick up the pieces of his broken life. There’s just one small problem – everyone thinks he’s dead. Arrested as a deserter, his only way out of prison is to work for a shadowy government agency monitoring the growth of Communism in post-war Europe. Special radio missions keep him busy in the air, while his all-female team, headed up by the icy Miss Miller, keeps his feet firmly on the ground. But then Charlie is forced to go undercover as a spy in a Communist group called the Rubble Rats. The government calls them the Red Menace, but Charlie finds a group of hard-working families just trying to get by – and his loyalties are torn. When he discovers that Grace Baker is one of them, Charlie must make some difficult decisions. For king and country? Or for the woman he once loved?

New Critical Nostalgia weighs the future of literary study by reassessing its past. It tracks today's impassioned debates about method back to the discipline’s early professional era, when an unprecedented makeover of American higher education with far-reaching social consequences resulted in what we might call our first crisis of academic life. Rovee probes literary study’s nostalgic attachments to this past, by recasting an essential episode in the historiography of English—the vigorous rejection of romanticism by American New Critics—in the new light of the American university’s tectonic growth. In the process, he demonstrates literary study’s profound investment in romanticism and reveals the romantic lyric’s special affect, nostalgia, as having been part of English’s professional identity all along. New Critical Nostalgia meticulously shows what is lost in reducing mid-century American criticism and the intense, quirky, and unpredictable writings of central figures, such as Cleanth Brooks, Josephine Miles, and W. K. Wimsatt, to a glib monolith of New Critical anti-romanticism. In Rovee’s historically rich account, grounded in analysis of critical texts and enlivened by archival study, readers discover John Crowe Ransom’s and William Wordsworth’s shared existential nostalgia, witness the demolition of the “immature” Percy Shelley in the revolutionary textbook Understanding Poetry, explore the classroom give-and-take prompted by the close reading of John Keats, consider the strange ambivalence toward Lord Byron on the part of formalist critics and romantic scholars alike, and encounter the strikingly contemporary quantitative studies by one of the mid-century’s preeminent poetry scholars, Josephine Miles. These complex and enthralling engagements with the romantic lyric introduce the reader to a dynamic intellectual milieu, in which professionals with varying methodological commitments (from New Critics to computationalists), working in radically different academic locales (from Nashville and New Haven to Baton Rouge and Berkeley), wrangled over what it means to read, with nothing less than the future of the discipline at stake.