Cicero’s Harbour

Owen C. Woolcock

Type: Beta project
Genre: Historical fiction
Word count: 60,000

Cicero’s Harbour is a literary fiction novel that examines the little-known story of Portofino, one of the most picturesque seaside villages in the world, and the Nazi plans to destroy it while retreating in the spring of 1945. With romantic drama elements, it follows an Allied soldier, a group of villagers, and partisans who fight to stop the Nazi plans.

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What’s this?

In early 1945, the Nazis gave orders to detonate the entire harbour of Portofino, Italy. Like Paris, Bruges and Amsterdam, Portofino survived WWII unscathed. How?

‘K’ is an Allied intelligence officer who washes up on a nearby beach in October 1944. He is found by two local fishermen, Cicero and his teenage son Marco, who transport him in secret to Vessinaro, an abandoned villa on the hills behind Portofino, so he can continue to aid the Italian Resistance in the final months of the war.

A beautiful young war widow, Dido, is asked by Cicero to assist and conceal his presence. With defeat looming, the Nazi forces become more brutal and unpredictable. ‘K’, Dido and Cicero grow closer, share difficult chapters of their individual journeys through the war, and in March 1945, must decide what they are willing to sacrifice to save Portofino and the people they care for.

I am 42, British-Australian, and have written this during a (climate change) research role at Harvard University, accessing the university’s vast archives for historical context. I have been a guest lecturer at several universities, written a historical memoir (Troubador-Matador UK) on the experience of Western expats fleeing the 1979 Iranian Revolution, and I have appeared in The Financial Times, Boston Globe, Washington Post and Sydney Morning Herald in either op-ed pieces or on the record media commentary. I have a new theory for historical fiction where a single, almost invisible deviation allows the emotional and moral consequences of events to unfold differently. This is my first work of fiction.

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