Rating: 4 out of 5

Listened to with Mum as an Audio book over several occasions. A nice, simple story with likeable characters in a beautifully described Italian castle which seems to colour every situation with just a little more love. A good listen.

Highlighted passages:

For years she had been able to be happy only by forgetting happiness.

You don’t try to be, or do. You simply are.”

No good could come out of the thinking of a beautiful young woman. Complications could come out of it in profusion, but no good. The thinking of the beautiful was bound to result in hesitations, in reluctances, in unhappiness all round.

Was it possible that loneliness had nothing to do with circumstances, but only with the way one met them?

Beauty made you love, and love made you beautiful.

It did seem that people could only be really happy in pairs—any sorts of pairs, not in the least necessarily lovers, but pairs of friends, pairs of mothers and children, of brothers and sisters—and

Originally posted to my Goodreads account