Talking Location With Joanna O’Donoghue – WORLD
Historical novel set in TUSCANY and LONDON
22nd April 2025
The Last Letters from Villa Clara by Sarah Steele, historical novel set in TUSCANY and LONDON
The Last Letters from Villa Clara by Sarah Steele is a wonderfully entertaining read. Not only is it an engrossing mystery, it also pulls at your heartstrings as its love stories unwind. The novel is truly evocative of the landscape of Tuscany and various localities in London, over a forty-year timespan.
Phoebe Cato has always loved visiting her cherished uncle Bruce in his Tuscan home, Villa Clara. It is a home-from-home for her and Bruce has always been closer to her than her parents. The letters referred to in the title are part of the puzzle that Bruce sets for Phoebe in his final days. She is tasked with finding out the truth about several family secrets and her own happiness might depend on her solving the clues that she has been left. She must hunt down people who can help her, connecting with those who have further information and finally challenging her uncle’s nemesis, in order to right a wrong that dates back to the second world war.
I love a book that educates me about a particular subject and I found the detail about art history in this story fascinating. The author says in her Afterword that she spent a lot of time researching and consulting art experts and she deploys the knowledge she has gained with a light touch. Having recently returned from both Tuscany and London myself, it was easy to recognise the settings from Steele’s atmospheric descriptions. Not only that, she describes the details of the different time periods beautifully, from the horrors and deprivation of wartime to the swinging sixties and the dawn of the modern era in the late 1980s.
You will enjoy The Last Letters from Villa Clara if you like a good puzzle and a book with a few serious twists at the end. There are also some wonderfully drawn relationships and romances with many a bump in the road. It’s hard to categorise the book, so I would place it as a mystery novel with strong themes of love, both romantic and within the family. I heartily recommend it.
Sue for the TripFiction Team
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