Bless Me Father is the shocking and revealing life story of Cape Town based writer and poet, Mario d'Offizi.

The book tracks several decades of what can only be described as an amazing South African life. Mario d'Offizi's Italian father was sent to the erstwhile Abyssinia as one of Mussolini's black shirts during World War II. Captured as a prisoner of war, he was released as a free man into post war South Africa, Bloemfontein. There he met Mario's mother, a women who was orphaned as a child in the Congo, who grew up in the Langlaagte orphanage and who lived as an adult with a succession of violent and abusive men.

Although both his parents were alive, d'Offizi (along with his siblings) grew up in a range of orphanages and institutions, where he lived a troubled and often violent life where he was repeatedly abused, as a child and as a teenager.

From d'Offizi's 2006 journey to the DRC as a potential investigative journalist to his social education under the mentorship of Lady Oppenheimer and his experiences of violence and abuse at the hands of a range of parental figures, Bless Me Father is remarkable as much for the style and warmth of d'Offizi's approach to the subject matter as it is for its revelatory content.

Funny, shocking, poignant and inspirational in equal measures, Bless Me Father is a unique book. It is a book about an often forgotten period of South Africa's history, and a book about personal growth and achievement in the face of family patterns of tragedy and pain formed over many decades.