One Italian Summer

Katy has just lost her mother. Carol was her best friend and the first person she called with any news, and the silence where her advice used to be is hard to bear. A mother-daughter trip to Positano, long planned and long postponed, is still on the calendar.

Positano is the Amalfi Coast town where Carol spent the summer before she met Katy's father. Katy has waited years for Carol to take her there. Now she makes the trip alone, and on arrival she feels her mother's presence in the cliffsides, the water and the food. Grief loosens its hold a little.

Then Carol appears in person, healthy, sun-tanned and thirty years old. Katy cannot explain how, and the novel does not ask her to dwell on it for long. She simply has her mother back, for one summer.

She gets to know Carol as a young woman who has no idea what is coming. This Carol is not quite the person Katy pictured, and Katy has to reconcile the mother who knew everything with a woman still working out her own life.

This is contemporary fiction with a touch of the magical, told in the third person and centred on a mother and daughter. It is warm in mood and sunlit in setting, with grief running underneath. The same author wrote In Five Years.