A novel full of great food and beautiful scenery. You feel like you are in Italy yourself. Although one part of the story is a bleak winter during the war and the other is a sunny summer in the 1970ties.
An English pilot is shot down over Tuscany during World War II and a local woman nurses him back to health.
Thirty years later his daughter finds a letter mentioning a "beautiful boy" when she is clearing his house after he had died. She wonders if her father sired a child when he was in Italy during the war. She travels to the little village to try to find out more about his past and comes to enjoy the life in rural Tuscany.
In the beginning the two storylines were a bit irritating but later on they became more entwined and I started to like the novel a lot more.
SPOILER ALERTS. There are some big plotholes: 1) If the death duties on an estate were over a million pound would you ever be able to buy the building 30 years later for a couple of hundred thousands? 2) If you were an arthistorian and in desperate need of money and had a house full of paintings would you not get them appraised so you could sell them?
I also have the feeling the people in general fall very fast in love and taking very big leaps. You would expect more soulsearching first.
4 stars out of 5
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