Books: The Enemy's Women

THE WINE OF ETNA (255 pp.)—Alexander Baron—Ives Washburn ($2.75).

American G.I.s were not the only ones to liberate Italy; the British were there too. In his second novel, Briton Alexander Baron (From the City, from the Plough) retells in fresh detail one of World War II fiction's most popular stories: what happens when invading Allied soldiers wash off the grime of battle and go out to meet the enemy's women.

Novelist Baron's soldiers belonged to a company of battle-worn British infantrymen who had fought their way across the Sicilian plain in the summer of...