"The Mermaid Garden"

Santa Montefiore's novels have been translated into twenty languages and have sold more than three million copies in England and Europe. Montefiore, who studied Spanish and Italian at Exeter University, now lives in London with her husband, historian Simon Sebag-Montefiore, and their two children.

She applied the Page 69 Test to her latest novel, The Mermaid Garden, and reported the following:

Here we meet Clementine, who’s young and scatterbrained and hating her first job in the Estate Agency in the small Devon town of Dawcomb-Devlish. She’s cynical about marriage because her parents divorced when she was little. She believes Submarine, as she calls her stepmother Marina, stole her father from her mother and she can’t bear her. But she dreams of falling in love. Sylvia, her colleague, is a thirty year old divorcee who’s having an affair with a married man she does not love. She thinks that Big Love only happens to the very few – she certainly doesn’t believe it will ever happen to her. On this page we meet two of the main characters and touch on the two major themes in the book: love and Clementine’s troubled relationship with her stepmother. You have to read on to meet Marina and the thwarted Italian lovers Floriana and Dante – and of course the hero, Rafa Santorno, from Argentina who comes to teach Marina’s hotel residents how to paint and changes the people around him – but who is he really and why does he come? For that you have to read right up to the last page of the book.

Learn more about the book and author at Santa Montefiore's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Perfect Happiness.

Visit the complete list of books in the Page 69 Test Series.

--Marshal Zeringue