It’s always a real pleasure join Bookouture‘s Books-on-tour – and today particularly so, as I’m helping launch the blog tour for The Florence Letter by Anita Chapman, and sharing my publication day review. Published today (24th June) with that thoroughly gorgeous cover, it’s now available via Amazon for kindle, in paperback, and also as an audiobook. My thanks to Bookouture for inviting me to join the tour and for my advance reading e-copy (provided via netgalley), and to Jess Readett for her ongoing support.
So many of you will already know Anita from her wonderful Neetsmarketing website – such a valuable resource for every bewildered or struggling author. But she’s also a very fine writer – her debut, The Venice Secret (if you missed it, it’s free via Kindle Unlimited), was independently published last year, and won her so many new friends who loved it as much as I did. In fact, it was one of my 2023 Books of the Year, and thoroughly deserved to be – you can read my review again here. I was delighted to hear that she’d signed with one of my favourite publishers – and from everything I’d read about her latest I knew it was another I was going to love…
Looking out over the twinkling city lights of Florence, Claire thinks of the letter that has brought her here. Written by a woman who escaped the Blitz, it holds a secret kept for a lifetime… but can Claire make the woman’s dying wish come true?
Claire arrives at her new job as researcher at a grand English country house, nursing a broken heart. But tucked into the back of a long-forgotten drawer she finds a letter written in an elegant hand. It tells of a wartime secret about the beautiful Lady Violet – whose passionate affair with an Italian prisoner of war scandalised the village and ended in tragedy.
Captivated, Claire promises to find Violet’s daughter, Tabitha, and reunite her with a priceless piece of her mother’s jewellery. With only the name of an Italian bakery, Pasticceria Mancini, to guide her, and the help of her handsome neighbour Jim, Claire travels to Tabitha’s last known location – Florence.
Winding through the colourful streets, the sun warm on her bare shoulders, a tantalising scent of freshly baked bread floats on the air and Claire’s heart leaps at the sight of an ageing bakery sign: Mancini. Although she learns that Tabitha hasn’t been there for many years, Claire refuses to give up. And as she and Jim talk late into the night over glasses of local chianti, Claire looks into his piercing blue eyes and finds herself growing closer to him…
But when they finally track Tabitha down, it isn’t the happy reunion she expected and Claire is left reeling in the wake of discovering a devastating family secret.
Violet’s story has an ending – but will the truth lead to forgiveness, or will it only bring more pain? And will Claire be forced to walk away from a chance of happiness with Jim at last?
Escape to Italy in this gorgeous story of past and present colliding. Readers of Lucinda Riley and Fiona Valpy will be utterly enchanted by this sweeping, romantic page-turner.
Time is running out for Margaret – now in her nineties – as she searches for the mysterious Tabitha and needs to carry out Lady Violet’s dying wish, to pass on a piece of valuable jewellery. Her letters to Gately Hall – where she lived and worked as a lady’s maid during wartime – have gone unanswered until Claire finds one in a drawer when she takes up her job of organising a “below stairs” exhibition at the hall. Initially seeing it as an interesting focus for her display – Margaret must have interesting stories about her time at the hall – Claire becomes caught up in the search for Tabitha, travelling to Florence and uncovering a number of deeply hidden secrets.
When a dual time story is this well written, with linked stories that are equally engaging, it’s fairly guaranteed that it’ll be a personal favourite. The timelines are beautifully managed, with Margaret’s experiences slowly revealed, the reader often a step ahead of Claire as she digs more deeply into the mystery – and I particularly liked the fact that the stories didn’t unfold over alternate chapters, but were allowed to flow as they needed to. The pacing is clever too – the story lingers over Margaret’s time at the hall, her experience of service and her developing relationship with Lady Violet, society’s constraints and expectations for a single woman at that point in history particularly well captured, with moments of drama and heartbreak, then skips through the major events in her difficult later life. Her whole story is tremendously engaging at an emotional level – and laced with secrets that later surface.
Claire’s story is equally well told – a fresh start for her after a difficult time, when she finds herself living in a cottage next door to ranger Jim, a friendship that might just develop into something rather more. But my goodness, she makes some very questionable choices along the way – and there are most certainly some obstacles to them ever being more than friends. I really enjoyed their will they/won’t they story though – and even more so when they found themselves, rather unexpectedly, travelling to Italy in search of the bakery that might provide the clues they need to solve the mystery of Tabitha’s disappearance. The Italian settings are perfectly handled, with the loveliest detail – I really felt I was there too.
While the mystery really is entirely enthralling, I also enjoyed the mirroring between the two stories – in different circumstances, both women make fresh starts, experience heartbreak, struggle with relationships. And, I have to say, I was totally invested in both their stories – and found their conclusion particularly satisfying. A really lovely read, and one I’d very much recommend.
About the author
Anita likes to read journals and diaries from the past, and one of her favourite pastimes is visiting art galleries and country houses. Her first published novel, The Venice Secret, was inspired by her mother taking her to see the Canalettos at The National Gallery in London as a child.
The Venice Secret was published in March 2023 and spent six weeks in the overall Amazon UK Kindle Top 100, reaching number thirty-eight. The Venice Secret has had over four million Kindle Unlimited pages read and received more than 3000 Amazon reviews since publication.
Since 2015, Anita has worked as a social media manager, training authors on social media, and helping to promote their books. She’s run several courses in London and York, and has worked as a tutor at Richmond and Hillcroft Adult Community College.
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