The Bells of Santa Marija

Malta, 1941. Marija Bonnici cuts rock shelters under the villages while bombers come over from Sicily five times a day, and she reads limestone better than any man in her father's gang. A haulier who wants her quarry, her name, and her hand is squeezing her family through hunger. Beneath the ground she shares a coffin-width shaft with a Cornish bomb-disposal officer — and a secret that could bury the island itself.