Set in 1950s Italy, it follows the relationship and marriage of the 17-year-old daughter of an old but impoverished aristocratic family and a young neurologist who has resolved never to be emotionally dependent upon anyone.

Chiara attends a concert where she meets the young neurologist Dr Salvatore Rossi, a man who constantly misreads people and responds with rude irritation to the most innocent of comments.

Repelled by his upbringing in the small Southern Italian town of Mazzata, and by his father’s hero-worship of the pre-war Communist leader Antonio Gramsci, Rossi has resolved never to be emotionally dependent upon anyone.

Chiara goes back to England to finish her education at her English convent school, and on her return to Italy visits Rossi at work.

Full of good intentions, she decides to help the couple by instructing her lawyer to buy the land and give it back to Rossi as a gift.

It was the first of her late-career group of four historical novels (the others being The Beginning of Spring, The Gate of Angels and The Blue Flower) in which she moved away from stories rooted in her own personal experience, to explore other countries and other times.

[2] Italy was a country for which the author had strong feelings, her late husband Desmond having fought there during the War, and the couple having spent their honeymoon there in 1949.

Philip Howard in The Times said it had "the sort of whimsical perceptions you would expect" while Charles Hawtree in The Daily Telegraph considered the prose to be "careless".

Anne Duchêne in the Times Literary Supplement praised Fitzgerald's "very funny, warm and gently ironic" writing that displays "tremendous physical presence both in surface-textures and sensuousness".

[7] Julian Barnes, in a 2013 introduction to the novel, referenced Fitzgerald's interest in innocence, not as the usual passive characteristic, but rather as a practical approach to dealing with the world, with an active application in the pursuit of happiness.