Other People's Children
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3 Months Free + £10 Audible voucher
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Other People's Children
Narrated by:
Tom Lawrence
Buy Now for £15.27
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Narrated by:
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Tom Lawrence
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By:
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Ben Faccini
Reaching back to the tumultuous days of the Italian resistance during the Second World War and into the domestic chaos of modern life, this is a story of the past's long shadow, and the families we have and those we make.©2026 Ben Faccini (P)2026 W.F. Howes Ltd.
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Wonderful meaningful words
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Faccini grew up in France and Italy and has worked for many years for UNESCO in Paris working on their publications on sorely disadvantaged children. He travelled working abroad including in Egypt, Mozambique and Zambia gathering material for the UNESCO reports. His Anglo-Italian-French roots male him also an accomplished and awarded translator.
This biographical background elucidates Faccini’s fictional Tomasmaso (Tom) who has been living for two years in a cramped London flat with Madeleine who works in publishing and her two young feisty sons Seb and Luc. Tom’s work abroad studying severely disadvantaged children in difficult parts of the world in which he is deeply immersed takes him away for stretches of time, and when he is back home, the boys play up and make it clear that Tom is not their father. Tom’s life is further complicated by helping his ninety year-old grandmother Alma in her nearby large top-floor flat in a crumbling mansion block untouched since the end of the war filled with memorabilia, a few scurrying mice and rambling plants The bond between Alma and Tom is mutually strong because Alma had brought up her grandson after the death of his father (Alma’s son) and the flight of his mother to America.
Alma is an astonishingly real and complex creation – perhaps there are elements of Faccini’s own grandmother named Alma which help to make fictional Alma so blisteringly real with her trauma-damaged mind in all its eccentricities, and idiosyncrasies. There are locked rooms, medicinal plants trailing and thrusting in every space and stacks of treasured artefacts and papers, and amongst it all reigns Alma. Her memories and stories – perhaps true, perhaps misremembered, perhaps fictional but certainly painful, – torrent from her. What is so superb about all these unstoppable and loosely connected outpourings is the language made so brilliantly alive by the narrator. Alma’s English is a rich mix of English and Italian, each language gloriously vital. I loved it. Alma had lived in Italy through the trauma of the Italian Resistance in WW2, alone with her son trying to get to England where her husband was working.
As Tom has to spend more time looking after his grandmother and financial worries are adding to the stress between him and Madeleine, he suggests that they should move in temporarily with Alma. What a high risk solution that sounds, but despite Alma’s extreme fears and delusions which plague her night and day, a touching bond is formed between her and the boys despite the mice who absorb all the stories she loves telling them.
There is a section of desolation after Alma’s death ,which Madeleine had to cope with when Tom was away, when Gabriel, Madeleine’s domineering and violent husband whom she is in the process of divorcing, claims her back. Tom he is alone in the flat, now painfully empty of Madeleine, silent without the boys who had grown to love him. Gabriel’s shouted words to him after he had thrown Tom’s birthday present for Seb unopened into the bushes continued to ring in his head “YOU CAN NEVER MAKE OHER PEOPLE’S CHILDREN YOUR OWN!”
There is so many depths to Faccini’s created characters. Ir is refreshing to read about relationship complexities from the male standpoint as so much is written from the female’s. The growing bond between Tom and the boys is deeply moving as he engages with them, through stories and his patient assuaging of their night fears.
Tom’s experiences abroad working with and for shockingly deprived children has its own stresses, frustrations and constraints and his absences are hard for Madelaine. These seemingly impossible demands involved in rebuilding a family with ‘other people’s children’ with an angry and hostile ex-husband in the background, coupled with financial pressures and a dependent elderly relative will find echoes in many readers’ experiences.
The final account of Alma’s time during the Italian Resistance when she struggled to escape the terrors and reach England is the most dramatic, powerful, terrifying – and revealing – of the whole book. What happened is the key to poor damaged Alma’s secrets and fears, and also a layer of the ‘other people’s children’ theme.
The whole book is layered with each layer elucidating one another. The final chapter with its final perfect words cements them together for an ending of restoration and healing.
Spectacular
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Unhappy families
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