My Father's House

Set during the nine-month Nazi occupation of Rome, the novel follows Monsignor Hugh O'Flaherty, an Irish Catholic priest attached to the Holy Office, a department within the Vatican, as he leads a clandestine network of civilians and diplomats known as "the Choir" in hiding escaped Allied prisoners of war and Jewish refugees from the Gestapo. The narrative alternates between a tense countdown to a dangerous Christmas Eve 1943 mission code-named "the Rendimento" (Italian for "performance") and retrospective interviews and memoirs recorded by the Choir's surviving members in the early 1960s.

The novel opens on Sunday, December 19th, five days before the mission. Delia Kiernan, the wife of the senior Irish diplomat to the Vatican and a professional singer, races a diplomatic car through nighttime Rome, rushing Major Sam Derry, an escaped British prisoner disguised in a German uniform, to a hospital after he collapses during reconnaissance. O'Flaherty rides alongside her. Derry is the designated runner for the Rendimento, a covert operation to deliver $80,000 across the city in three drops to fund the relocation of escaped prisoners into the countryside. His illness throws the plan into jeopardy.

Through Delia's 1963 BBC interview, the novel flashes back to reveal how the Choir formed. She describes hosting social evenings for young Irish clergy at the Irish Legation, Ireland's diplomatic mission to the Vatican, where she first met O'Flaherty. He was transformed by visiting Axis prisoner-of-war camps as a Vatican observer, where he witnessed horrific conditions and distributed food to starving prisoners in defiance of regulations. The Pope reprimanded O'Flaherty, stripping his authority and confining him to Vatican City, warning that his interference endangered the Vatican's neutrality. Despite this, O'Flaherty began quietly aiding escaped prisoners and Jews, forming the Choir as cover for an organized Escape Line.

The novel introduces the Choir's other members through their own voices. Enzo Angelucci, a Roman newsstand vendor, recalls encountering a terrified young escaped prisoner in St. Peter's Square and bringing him to O'Flaherty, who smuggled the man into the Vatican infirmary with false papers. The Contessa Giovanna Landini, a widowed Italian noblewoman, reveals that O'Flaherty saved her from suicide: Consumed by grief after her husband's death, she had been carrying a loaded pistol when she met the priest, who heard her confession and unloaded the weapon. Sir D'Arcy Osborne, the British Ambassador living in refuge inside the Vatican, provides a diplomat's perspective on the operation. His servant John May proves a genius of procurement, smuggling uniforms, forged identity cards, and grenades into the Vatican. Marianna de Vries, a Swiss journalist, describes the Choir's weekly rehearsals in a haunted annex, where eight core members sang hymns as cover while O'Flaherty circulated whispered instructions on scraps of paper that were then burned.

Opposing O'Flaherty is Hauptmann, the fictional Gestapo commander of Rome. The novel grants him interior scenes revealing chilling contradictions: He orders fresh flowers for his headquarters while torture apparatus is installed in the cellar; he speaks tenderly to his wife Elise by telephone while sending a weeping deserter to be shot. Under pressure from Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, over prisoner escapes, Hauptmann develops an obsession with O'Flaherty. In a prior encounter, he confronted the priest inside a confession box at a Roman church, warned him that aiding the Escape Line meant death, and set his motorcycle on fire outside.

As Christmas Eve approaches, O'Flaherty determines that Angelucci must replace the hospitalized Derry as mission-runner. He communicates through coded messages on banknotes and signals exchanged with the Contessa across the Vatican border. At the Holy Office, he destroys 11 sheets of Escape Line records hidden inside a medieval manuscript. An intruder violently tries to break down his office door but fails. Afterward, O'Flaherty finds a note in his pigeonhole reading "YOUR LAST CHRISTMAS," accompanied by 32 bloodied human teeth.

On Christmas Eve evening, O'Flaherty descends into tunnels beneath the Vatican to meet the weakened Derry and test Angelucci's cover identity. Angelucci performs well, but O'Flaherty, still wary of Angelucci's hot temper and lack of combat training, leaves him a note declaring he is not ready and resolves to run the Rendimento himself. Meanwhile, Hauptmann reads the completed intelligence dossier, which recommends O'Flaherty's covert arrest and execution.

At 11 o'clock, disguised in a monk's cowl, O'Flaherty crosses the darkened Basilica, unlocks the Sistine Chapel with a copied wooden key, collects $30,000 from a hiding place in the Vatican Museums, and exits into occupied Rome under the alias Marco Mancuso. He hitches a ride on a garbage truck past a roadblock and bluffs through a German checkpoint. At the Tiber, he finds every bridge barricaded. May, who learned independently that the bridges would be closed, rows across the river to rescue him.

O'Flaherty makes a drop at de Vries's building, passing a satchel through a coal-cellar hatch. A Fascist policeman attacks him, but a masked figure later revealed to be Angelucci knocks the policeman unconscious. When German soldiers arrive, O'Flaherty claims he was aiding the fallen officer and talks his way free. He reaches Delia's apartment trailed by three German soldiers. Delia and her daughter Blon invite the soldiers inside, ply them with whiskey and harp music until they are drunk, then slip O'Flaherty out the back in an overcoat with the remaining cash sewn into its lining.

Blindfolded and driven across Rome, O'Flaherty arrives at a seamstress's home, where the banknotes are extracted and packed into hollowed-out fruitcakes. Hauptmann receives reports identifying the nightwalker and races toward the city. As dawn approaches, O'Flaherty walks toward the Vatican but is intercepted by Hauptmann at gunpoint.

Hauptmann forces O'Flaherty toward his Mercedes, vowing to extract the names of all conspirators. O'Flaherty deploys a desperate fabrication: He tells Hauptmann that Elise and the children have defected into Vatican City and that photographs of them with the British Ambassador have been cabled to Berlin. A flashback reveals the seed of this lie: Two months earlier, Elise visited O'Flaherty to request asylum, but when he arranged a midnight meeting, the children ran back to their father's car and the family drove away. The deception works long enough for O'Flaherty to knock the gun from Hauptmann's hand and speed away in the Mercedes. The Contessa waits at the rendezvous with a stolen motorcycle. She plunges her lit cigarette into the Mercedes' fuel tank and drives them through the back streets as the car explodes behind them. Derry and Osborne wait at the Vatican Museums' door, and the group hurries to safety.

The Choir members take refuge in the Vatican through early 1944, running further missions. Tensions fracture the group when O'Flaherty insists on aiding deserting German soldiers, which Osborne opposes, and the two stop speaking. De Vries departs one June morning and sees a lone American Army jeep heading toward St. Peter's Square: Liberation has arrived. Hauptmann is tried in 1948 for ordering the massacre of 335 Romans in the Ardeatine Caves as reprisal for a Partisan bombing and is sentenced to life imprisonment. During the occupation, 1,800 Roman Jews were deported to death camps; fewer than 20 returned.

In the novel's coda, the Contessa recounts a 1963 reunion with O'Flaherty in London, where the surviving Choir members gather for a BBC television recording of This Is Your Life honoring Derry. A young woman named Monica tells O'Flaherty she is the daughter of a soldier he saved, named after the convent where her father hid; her brother is named Hugh, after O'Flaherty. The Contessa and O'Flaherty quarrel when she asks a question he refuses to answer. In a posthumous letter sent after his death, O'Flaherty reveals the truth: He visited Hauptmann nine times in prison and baptized him into the Catholic faith, with Hauptmann's estranged children as witnesses. He expresses uncertainty about Hauptmann's sincerity but states that his faith compels him to offer good to those who hate him. He closes by telling the Contessa she gave him strength when he doubted goodness, ending with a reflection on mercy and forgiveness that echoes the novel's title.