Spoiler alert: the following summarizes the novel Warlight by Michael Ondaatje.

A twenty-eight year old looks back on his life from the vantage point of his mother’s Suffolk village. His father has disappeared from his life following the Second World War and his mother’s presence in his life proved spotty. He has a sister who refuses contact with him for her sense of betrayal by their parents. He works in British Intelligence, as did his mother, and he begins to trace her experience during the direct aftermath of the War when fighting continued in the villages of Southern Italy and the Balkans and where she worked as “Viola,” radio voice of the BBC spreading pro-Democracy propaganda.

Suffolk Village

He will have to fill in the gaps in places where documentation does not exist. He does not, for instance, know why or how his mother left her family to work for the Allies after the War but begins to understand she did so because she was enamored of a man eight years her elder who she had known from her childhood. This man, Marsh Felon, is from a family of thatchers, and she nursed him for almost an entire summer when she was a child and he fell off her family’s roof and broke his hip at the age of sixteen. Her family, being the correct Class, then paid his way to University and it was there he was recruited to be a Spy.

"Cornish Children"

The young narrator, name of Nathaniel, derives this information after his mother’s death. What he cannot dig up in his job at Intelligence, he imagines. It is fifteen years after the end of the War and she has been assassinated in retaliation for her Intelligence work in the Balkans, work that led to the massacre of an entire village somewhere near Trieste. Because she was the radio voice that led partisans to the village and her identity determined during an interrogation of her partner, Marsh, it is possible to hold her accountable for the crime. 

Interrogation scene, "The English Patient"

When first Marsh and then Nathaniel’s mother are captured, she has come to the area around Naples to try to save Marsh. Under interrogation he tries to save her but slips up remembering birthmarks on her neck (he turns out fine in the end). Thus his captors discover her identity and she is tortured by hold-over Fascists near Naples. It is many years later, in Suffolk, that she is finally assassinated. I am not sure what to gather from this harvest, but maybe the point is that the lower Classes are better at survival and noblesse oblige creates a mess where one is not necessary. Or, more simply, do not follow dangerous men. Or, after the War, identity became an element central to one's life. 

Spanish Quarter, Naples

Just after the War, at the point Nathaniel begins his story (in medias res), friends of his mother, friends who also work in Intelligence, watch after him and his sister. Nathaniel begins having sex and impregnates a young woman, Agnes. Following an attempt on his life by his mother’s enemies, Nathaniel must live under Government protection—in a sort of purgatory. So, Nathaniel is taken from Agnes, and she cannot be allowed to find him. She winds up marrying one of his handlers, a much older man, a thief and smuggler, known as The Darter. The two raise Agnes and Nathaniel’s child. 

London, the Blitz (German bombing campaign)

And this is the plot, roughly, of Warlight by Michael Ondaatje. 'War light' was the term coined during the Blitz to describe London at night, blacked out but for the orange lights at the base of Thames River arches meant to signal to barges, sometimes filled with munitions, a safe route. It is ‘light,’ or lack thereof, that works as a metaphor for remembrance and discovery in the novel. Nowhere near as tightly packaged as The English Patient, but the same type of story, Warlight is overly Romantic (and Ondaatje's narcissism is on full display) if you ask me. 

Here is a good review:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v40/n21/tessa-hadley/the-runaways