Last Voyage of the Valentina [Paperback]

Set in London during the swinging sixties and Italy’s Amalfi coast after Word War II,The Last Voyageof the Valentina is an epic romance with a dark uncercurrent of suspense from an author theDaily Mail(UK) has declared “is the new Rosamunde Pilcher.”

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. But then she discovers a portrait of her dead mother, Valentina—a woman she'd hardly known, whose story has been kept from her by her still grieving father. Determined to learn the truth about Valentina, Alba returns to the olive groves of the Amalfi coast of Italy. There she uncovers a mysterious tale of decadence, deception, murder, and betrayal involving partisans and Nazis, peasants, and counts. Alba's journey leads her not only to the truth of her mother’s hidden past but to the possibility of happiness in her own future.INTRODUCTION
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.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1. The prologue opens the book with a gruesome murder, and yet the central action of the story is of love and self realization. How does this killilS!