The Invitation

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When Hal sees the wife of one of the wealthy men aboard, he realizes that it’s Stella Truss, with whom he had spent a night in Rome two years earlier and who has been impossible to forget. He was willing to think the worst of her husband and see her as the embodiment of all that was good. This book has great potential: mostly interesting characters, a fascinating era, wonderful settings, and two storylines that weave together well. Foley ( The Book of Lost and Found, 2015) layers the ensuing drama with Stella’s tragic back story as well as the narrative on which the film is based, a tale found in the 16th-century journal of one of the contessa’s ancestors.

As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. She then worked for several years as a fiction editor, during which time she wrote The Book of Lost and Found.I was gripped from the beginning- a book which held my attention as a result of good characterisation, intense plot, superb style and wonderful sense of place. I like to be up to watch the blue-hulled fishing boats setting out in the young hours and then, at dusk, heading home laden with the day’s catch. Hal and Stella are the two main characters of this book and we follow both their stories lines, both past and present, as their paths cross.

This is a beautifully written book, with rich descriptions of settings along the Mediterranean - from the coast of Italy, to the south of France.This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs.

The Invitation is more compelling in comparison to Foley’s other historical fiction; the mystery is intriguing and the conflict is clear and convincing. The gown, the centuries-old bricks, the flames of the torches: modern Rome suddenly feels a long way away.In the book, once the old friends arrive in the estate, they spend 48 hours getting to know each other and catching up on their lives, remembering the old times they had together and drinking. In Europe’s post-war wreckage, the glittering Italian Riviera draws an eclectic cast of characters; lured by the glamour but seeking an escape.