Notes

Fiction award: Books are my bag readers' awards 2021.
Dymocks book of the year 2021.
Set across four decades, from the 1940s to the early 80s, this is a beautiful, big-hearted, richly tapestried story of people brought together by love, war, art, flood and the ghost of E.M. Forster. It's 1944 and in the ruined wine cellar of a Tuscan villa, as the Allied troops advance and bombs fall around them, two strangers meet and share an extraordinary evening together. Ulysses Temper is a young British solider from the East End of London. Evelyn Skinner is a middle-aged spinster, an art historian who has come to Italy to salvage paintings from the ruins and relive her memories of the time long ago when she met EM Forster and had her heart stolen by an Italian maid in a particular Florentine room with a view. These two unlikely people find kindred spirits in each other and Evelyn's talk of truth and beauty plants a seed in Ulysses mind that will shape the trajectory of his life over the next four decades. (Publisher)