Three of Ignazio Silone’s powerful novels, _Fontamara_, _Bread and Wine_, and _A Handful of Blackberries_, deal with Italian political history from the middle thirties to the years immediately following World War II. Writing from exile when the Fascists were in power, Silone consistently dealt with the repression of the Italian peasant. Although he always focuses on small places such as Fontamara, Pietrasecca, and San Luca, his characters are in a sense generic, representing the non-Fascists who want only enough bread and wine to live life decently with a little comfort and security. Silone describes the regimentation of Italian life in the city as well as the village. He also shows, as does Koestler in _Darkness at Noon_, the destruction of the Communist Party after the rise to power of a dictatorship of the Right. _A Handful of Blackberries_ has as its background the resurgence of the Italian Communist Party after the fall of Mussolini. But Silone preserves a continuity with his earlier books by a continuing account of the struggle of the peasants against the landed families. In this book the Tarocchi family is the equivalent of Prince Torlonia in Fontamara. Fascism has been crushed, but the great landowner is still the force which the peasant must fight to keep his small plot. =Alan Paton: The Trek of the Boers= Alan Paton’s _Cry, the Beloved Country_ and _Too Late the Phalarope_ detail the bases of South Africa’s explosive contemporary political life. The anti-Negro legislation, the segregation, the police control of the native peoples are all set forth. Paton’s moving novels record the individual tragedies which transpire in this climate of tears and violence. They also show their historical antecedents. The red flashes which Pieter Van Vlaanderen wore on his shoulders during the war meant that he would fight anywhere in Africa. To some this made him a Smuts man, a traitor to the language and struggle of the Afrikaner people, and a lickspittle of the British Empire and the English King, fighting in an English war that no true Afrikaner would take part in. Here is a historical fact that illustrates the division between the peoples of South Africa. Another is the Immorality Act of 1927, which typifies another great source of conflict and causes Pieter’s ruin. =Richard Kaufmann: The Third Reich=