Alba Arbuckle always feels like an outsider. She hardly knew her Italian mother, Valentina, and her English father acts as if Valentina never existed. Alba despises country life almost as much as she despises her stepmother and stepsisters. On board the London houseboat named after her dead mother, Alba’s life is little more than a selfish search for fun and pleasure.
But the discovery of her mother’s portrait sends Alba back to Italy to find her family—and the truth about Valentina. Amid the olive groves of the Amalfi coast, she discovers a tale of deception and betrayal revealing a secret web of partisans and Nazis, peasants and counts, and ultimately a forbidden truth. What Alba finds in the past is heartrending, but it’s the gateway to her own future.