What’s So Special About Venice? By Rhys Bowen
Rhys Bowen returns with a sweeping historical novel that will leave a mark in the hearts of readers everywhere. THE VENICE SKETCHBOOK (Lake Union | on sale April 13th, 2021), opens in Venice, 1938: a country on the brink of war and a woman at the beginning of a quest that begins with locked-away memories from a family legacy.
We asked Rhys, what is so special about Venice?
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One question writers are always asked is where we get our ideas from. Sometimes it isn’t possible to define this. A tiny germ of an idea turns into something bigger: an overheard snatch of conversation turns into a full-blown mystery. An afternoon trip to Ellis Island sparked my whole Molly Murphy series. But in the case of THE VENICE SKETCHBOOK I can tell you exactly what created the story for me.
The first thing is Venice itself. Who wouldn’t want to write about that magical city, where the marble palaces seem to float above the water, where a gondolier’s song echoes up from the canals. Spending a summer doing research in Venice was an absolute treat, rekindling all my memories of past vacations in that city.
I have a life-long love of Venice that started in my childhood. When I was a teenager my parents rented a little villa just outside the city of Venice. Every day we’d drive across the causeway, park and my parents would give us some money.
“See you at five o’clock,” they’d say and we were free to wander the city on our own. We’d explore back alleys, climb trees in the Giardini, swim at the Lido and check out every gelato stand in the city. We got to know our way around really well, in fact when I went back again for the first time, taking my daughter who had just graduated from high school, I’d stop and say, “If you go through this little tunnel, I think you’ll come out…”
“Mom,” she’d say. “That’s someone’s back yard. You can’t…:
But I went through and yes—we came out to exactly the place I was heading.
It must seem amazing to parents now that mine would let their children loose in a strange city in days before cell phones. We’d have had no way of contacting them during the day, unless they were taking their morning coffee in St. Mark’s Square, as they did every morning, (before it became a thirty dollar extravaganza).
My other Venice connection was my aunt. A lifelong Italiafile, she went to Venice every Easter. She was the typical English spinster, very prim and proper. When she took me to Rome once and I suggested we go out after dinner she looked horrified. “A lady does not go out unescorted after dinner,” she said.
A few years ago I was thinking about my aunt and wondered why it was always Venice at Easter, not Rome or another Italian city. And an improbable thought entered my head. What if it was not just the city and the Easter celebrations that attracted her. What if she met someone there? A sort of ‘same time, next year’. What if she had another life that none of us knew about?
And so the story grew in my head. An old woman dying, having lived a life that her family had no idea about. Her last bequest to her beloved great niece is a box containing three keys and a sketchbook. A Venice Sketchbook. What will those keys open? What clues does the sketchbook contain? And will Caroline, her great niece, be able to right the wrongs of long ago?
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Rhys Bowen is the New York Times bestselling author of more than forty novels, including The Victory Garden, The Tuscan Child, and the World War II-based In Farleigh Field, the winner of the Left Coast Crime Award for Best Historical Mystery Novel and the Agatha Award for Best Historical Novel. Bowen’s work has won twenty honors to date, including multiple Agatha, Anthony, and Macavity awards. Her books have been translated into many languages, and she has fans around the world, including seventeen thousand Facebook followers. A transplanted Brit, Bowen divides her time between California and Arizona.
Find out more about Rhys on her website https://rhysbowen.com/
Follow her on Twitter @Rhysbowen
THE VENICE SKETCHBOOK
Caroline Grant is struggling to accept the end of her marriage when she receives an unexpected bequest. Her beloved great-aunt Lettie leaves her a sketchbook, three keys, and a final whisper…Venice. Caroline’s quest: to scatter Juliet “Lettie” Browning’s ashes in the city she loved and to unlock the mysteries stored away for more than sixty years.
It’s 1938 when art teacher Juliet Browning arrives in romantic Venice. For her students, it’s a wealth of history, art, and beauty. For Juliet, it’s poignant memories and a chance to reconnect with Leonardo Da Rossi, the man she loves whose future is already determined by his noble family. However star-crossed, nothing can come between them. Until the threat of war closes in on Venice and they’re forced to fight, survive, and protect a secret that will bind them forever.
Key by key, Lettie’s life of impossible love, loss, and courage unfolds. It’s one that Caroline can now make right again as her own journey of self-discovery begins.
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Category: On Writing
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