In A Certain Light, Cynthia Banham trains her journalist’s eye on her Italian ancestry and the plane crash she survived to tell this story.

The hunt for her great-aunt Amelia’s lost diary, alongside living with the amputation of both legs, takes Banham on a journey, literally and within.

Banham has two boxes to delve into, which have remained stored away far too long. One box will help her connect with the mysterious Amelia, a relative most like Cynthia herself, described in Triestine dialect as a ‘soul without peace’. The second box contains clippings of news reports of Garuda Indonesia Flight 200 that crash-landed in Yogyakarta, and the many well wishes sent to her from strangers, including a knitted shawl.

Cynthia’s grandfather was captured by the Germans after Italy’s surrender, and became an Italian military internee for the duration of World War II. While he was enslaved in an armaments factory making tanks, Amelia, his older sister, put herself in harm’s way and worked for the Nazis as a secretary in order to get food for him.

After the war, Amelia used false documents to emigrate to America as a Yugoslav, only to die a violent death there at the age of 41.

Banham writes clearly and simply like the journalist she is. Her quest to find more information about her grandfather’s wartime past and why Amelia went to America was a way to rehabilitate her life after losing limbs and suffering 60 per cent burns to her body – her own war wounds.

By the book’s end, Banham has drawn her family’s story around herself to give meaning to the horror of her injuries and to her life.

Banham is smart, bold and clearly has an incredible life force. And like her great-aunt, she’d be a hell of a person to know.

A Certain Light is a moving and unforgettable read.

Reviewed by Josepha Dietrich