The Mermaid Garden - description

The internationally bestselling author of The French Gardener presents a complex and irresistibly compelling novel that confirms the remarkable power of love to heal and transform. 

Ten year old Floriana is captivated by the beauty of the magnificent Tuscan villa that overlooks the sea just outside her small village.  She likes to spy from the crumbling wall into the gardens and imagine that one day she’ll escape her meagre existence and live there surrounded by such otherworldly splendour.  Then, one day, Dante, the son of the villa’s powerful industrialist owner invites her inside.  He shows her the enchanting Mermaid Garden and from that moment on Floriana knows that the only destiny for her is there, in that garden, with him.  But as they grow up they cross an unseen line, jeopardising the very thing they hold most dear.

Decades later and hundreds of miles away, a beautiful old country house hotel on England’s Devon coast has fallen on hard times after the financial crash of 2008.  Its owner, Marina, advertises for an artist-in-residence to stay the summer and teach the guests how to paint.  The man she hires is charismatic and wise and soon begins to pacify the discord in her family and transform the fortunes of the hotel.  However, he is not who he seems.  He has his own agenda.  Is it to destroy, to seduce, or to heal? Whichever, it is certain to affect them all.