Last Voyage of the Valentina

Exotically beautiful but desperately unhappy, Alba lives on a houseboat on the Thames, where she enjoys a life of leisure and entertains an endless and unfulfilling succession of lovers. Though irresistible to men, her striking Mediterranean features and fiery temper distance her from her father and stepmother's aristocratic and highly traditional English family.

When Alba discovers a portrait of her dead mother, Valentina — a mysterious Italian beauty she'd hardly known, whose story has been kept from her by her still grieving father — she is instantly shaken from complacency. Determined to learn the truth about Valentina, Alba returns to the olive groves of the Amalfi coast of Italy, to her mother's tiny village of Incantellaria, ignoring the friends and family who urge her to leave the past alone. Once there, Alba discovers cultural roots and the love of a new family, and begins to uncover wartime secrets protected for decades. Alba's quest to understand her mother's identity takes her beyond anything she could have imagined, revealing a mysterious tale of desperation, decadence, deception, murder, and betrayal involving partisans and Nazis, peasants and counts. Alba's journey leads her not only to the truth of her family's hidden past but to the possibility of love and happiness in her own future.

"Last Voyage of the Valentina" is a sweeping, romantic story that makes for a great escape for any booklover.

"Long-legged, lascivious Alba lives on a London houseboat, the Valentina, moored in 1971 London. She is the daughter of a WWII romance; her proper English father, Thomas Arbuckle, and stepmother ('the Buffalo') never mention her mysterious Italian mother — Valentina — who died when she was a baby. As a discovered sketch sparks Alba's curiosity about her mother's past, she takes up with literary agent Fitz Conroy, then breaks it off and goes to Italy to learn the truth about her past. Though this is Montefiore's U.S. debut, more than three million copies of her books are in print in the EU (the press chat notes that Charles and Camilla 'made their debut as a couple' at Montefiore's wedding to historian Simon Sebag). Presumably, her EU translators were able to make lines like 'Don't talk, you fool. Kiss me,' sound more seductive and surprising in other languages than they do in the King's English. (June)" Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

Santa Montefiore's novels have been translated into twenty languages and have sold more than three million copies in Europe.  She studied Spanish and Italian at Exeter University.  She lives in London with her husband, historian Simon Sebag Montefiore, and their two children.