This, the fifth volume in the Don Camillo series, is the first wholly new anthology to be translated into English for over forty years. Against the background of the rise and fall of fascism and post-war communism in rural Italy, Giovanni Guareschi looks down with hawk’s-eye vision into the lives of ordinary people and delivers his message, as relevant today as ever, to allay prejudice and political correctness and follow one’s conscience, which is of course the voice which speaks to Don Camillo with humour and penetrating insight from the cross above the altar in the village church.