Description
HarperCollins Publishers Amedeo by Sebastian O'Kelly
Wartime love story set in Abyssinia Eritrea and the Yemen 19351945. Amedeo Guillet is still alive and living in County Meath Ireland. Khadija is lost.
This is the story of Amedeo Guillet an Italian calvary officer who was sent out to Abyssinia as part of Mussolinis army to establish and command a troupe of 2000 Spahis or Arabic calvary. He met and fell in love with Khadija a beautiful Ethiopian Muslim. Together they held up the British lorries heaving up the mountain road to Asmara and blew up the important Ponte Aosta. Eventually captured Amedeo went on the run disguised as an Arab eventually making it to Yemen only to be thrown in jail.
This is a rare view of the Second World War from an Italian perpective; particularly valuable are the chapters that tell the story of Italian resistance to the Nazis and their subsequent withdrawal from Italy in 1943.
There are few stories more cinemagraphic than this Fascist Italy his early years in Ethiopia commanding the Cossacklike Spahis the brutal Abyssinian war waged by the Duce Italian and British colonial rivalry; Amedeo led the last ever cavalry charge the British army faced (Eritrea 1941 they were massacred by tanks and submachine guns) defeat and guerrilla warfare against the British; then flight disguised as an Arab imprisonment in the Yemen and a great love lost as he leaves his beloved Khadija behind to face her future alone and returns to Italy to his fiancee and a career as a distinguished Italian diplomat and Arabist.
Amedeo is still alive and living in County Meath Ireland. Sebastian OKelly is a journalist for the Mail and Telegraph and has Amedeos full cooperation in writing this book.
This is a very valuable and absolutely stunning story beautifully told by OKelly.