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Synopsis

Alba always feels like an outsider. She hardly knew her Italian mother and her English father acts as if Valentina never existed. She despises country life almost as much as she despises her stepmother and stepsisters. On board the houseboat named after her dead mother, Alba's life is little more than a selfish search for fun and pleasure.

But the discovery of her mother's portrait sends the girl back to Italy to find her family – and the truth about Valentina. Amid the olive groves of the Amalfi coast, its balmy air rich with the scent of figs, a tale of deception and betrayal is waiting to be discovered. It is a tale that takes Alba into the past – but also gives her a new future.

Santa Montefiore's fifth novel adds a breathtaking new dimension to her limitless talent. Effortlessly recapturing both the London of the Swinging Sixties and Italy at war, she creates an epic romance with dark undercurrent of suspense.

Press Reviews

'Engaging and charming' - Penny Vincenzi, Mail on Sunday

'The kind of book you can't wait to get back to' - Tatler

About the Author

Santa Montefiore was born in England in 1970. Inspired by her mother's upbringing in Argentina she spent a year working on an estancia there, then, in the years that followed, all the time she could find free to travel. She lost her heart, not to a man, but to the land and later wrote four novels based in Latin America in an attempt to retrieve it. This she partly achieved, though a fragment of it is so deeply entrenched in the soil that it will be there for ever. She lives in London with her husband, the historian Simon Sebag Montefiore, and their children, Lily and Sasha.

Her previous novels, Meet Me Under the Ombu Tree, The Butterfly Box, The Forget-Me-Not Sonata and The Swallow and the Hummingbird are available in Coronet paperback. To find out more about her novels, visit Santa's website on www.santamontefiore.co.uk.