At 19, Edda Mussolini was married to Count Galleazzo Ciano, her father's Minister for Foreign Affairs during Italy's turbulent 1930s. Drawing on a wealth of memoirs and personal papers, Caroline Moorhead paints a portrait of a narcissistic young woman whose sheer force of character helped impose a brutal and vulgar movement on a desperate and eager society. Yet as Moorehead shows, not even Edda's colossal willpower, her scheming, nor her father's avowed love could save her husband from Mussolini's vengeance.