A surprise phone call from her late fiance's family sends Vivien Lowry ofBloomsbury Girls off on her next adventure. Struggling as a playwright, shemoves to Italy both to reckon with her past and create a new future as ascript-writer at the Cinecitt Studios in Rome. Here she encounters thegreatest male bastion of them all, the Vatican. Vivien ends up entangledbetween the church and the censors, while romantically caught between twomen: an enigmatic American film financier who is not who he says he is, and asocialist Italian prince and independent filmmaker w ho ends up under housearrest over a censored screenplay. Each of them has a wartime experiencefrom their past that they must revisit in order to move on - Vivien most of all.

'A wonderful novel full of charm, wit, and style.' - Dominic Smith, author of The Last Painting of Sara de Vos