Description
From Publishers Weekly A young woman finds love and sudden maturity in this charmingly melodramatic romance from the author of The Gypsy Madonna . Tragedy strikes an upper-class English family at its Cornish manor house in 1958: Robert Monty Montague has vanished, leaving behind a pile of debts, a pair of shoes washed up on the beach, a drifting motorboat bearing his gold pocket watch and a note in a bottle that reads, Forgive me. His spoiled daughter, the impossibly beautiful 21-year-old Celestria, is forced out of her shallow complacency to discover why her father, whom everyone loved and assumed to be so happy, apparently drowned himself. She follows a trail of bank statements to a seaside Italian convent converted into a family-run hotel. There, she encounters Hamish McCloud, a surly Scotsman who loathed Monty and, after a rocky start, develops a very different feeling toward Celestria. The prose is florid and fitting for the ridiculously, deliciously escapist whirlwind romance that envelopes Celestria and Hamish as the over-the-top revelations about Monty come to light. (May) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From Booklist Set in 1958 England, Montefiore’s novel follows the fortunes of the Montagues, a wealthy English family with an estate in Cornwall. The extended family meets for idyllic summers at the estate, but their perfect world is shattered when Robert Montague drowns in what appears to be a suicide. His beautiful, vain 21-year-old daughter, Celestria, is as shocked as the rest of the family but is unwilling to simply accept his death and move on. Instead, she begins to go through his papers and is surprised to discover that he was sending the family fortune to a lawyer in the small Italian town of Puglia. Celestria takes off for Italy, where she learns her father was keeping more than a few secrets from his family. Celestria finds more than she bargained for in the form of an angry widower who seems to hate her for no reason. Readers who enjoy family drama, romance, and mystery will find it all in this lush and absorbing novel. --Kristine Huntley "Montefiore is a grand storyteller." -- Emily Melton, Booklist Santa Montefiore’s books have been translated into more than twenty-five languages and have sold more than six million copies in England and Europe. She is the bestselling author of The Temptation of Gracie and the Deverill series, among many others. She is married to writer Simon Sebag Montefiore. They live with their two children, Lily and Sasha, in London. Visit her at SantaMontefiore.co.uk and connect with her on Twitter @SantaMontefiore or on Instagram @SantaMontefioreOfficial. Read more
Features & Highlights
- From the author of
- The Gypsy Madonna
- and
- The Last Voyage of the Valentina
- , a breathless novel that sweeps its heroine from the Cornish coast to the rugged beauty of Puglia Italy, where she discovers a shocking truth about her family and the way to save her ancestral home.
- Celestria Montague always spends her summers at Pendrift Hall, the rambling, shabby mansion adorned with wisteria and clematis that has been home to the Montague family for generations. It is 1958, and the family is celebrating her father's fiftieth birthday at a lavish ball. The celebratory night ends in death and tragedy, however, and young Celestria learns that the family may lose Pendrift Hall. Her grandfather urges Celestria to play detective, to solve the mysteries surrounding the night's events, and to save the ancient mansion if at all possible. Her quest takes her to Italy's rugged and beautiful Puglia, and into the dark, cool cloisters of the Convento di Santa Maria del Mare. Here Celestria meets an enigmatic stranger and confronts unwelcome truths about her family—and herself.
- Sea of Lost Love
- is Santa Montefiore at her very best—sensitive, sensual, and complex.
