When George Bolton returns home to Devon at the end of the war, Rita assumes that her childhood sweetheart will marry her and that their future will be a reassuring continuation of their past. But the boy who joined the RAF has come back a man, and a man irrevocably changed by the horrors that he has seen. Unable to settle back into the sleepy seaside village, George resolves to spend a year on the family farm in Argentina, and, despite her disappointment, Rita promises to wait for him.
Rita keeps her promise. But for George there are irresistible temptations, and an agonising choice to make ...
Santa Montefiore was born in England in 1970 to an Anglo-Argentine mother, and read Spanish and Italian at Exeter University. After a year teaching English on an Argentine estancia, she spent much of the nineties in Buenos Aires. She lives in London with her husband, the historian Simon Sebag Montefiore, and their two children.