I Give It To You (Paperback) - Valerie Martin

A timeless story of family, war, art, and betrayal from bestselling novelist Valerie Martin.

Jan Vidor seems like the ideal tenant for a long summer holiday in a Tuscan villa. Unobtrusive and quietly sociable, the American academic can be relied upon to entertain herself - but her aristocratic landlady Beatrice has made a terrible mistake. A chance remark about a violent death at Villa Chiara during the war piques Jan's writerly interest and sends her digging into the Salviati family's tragic past. Was Beatrice's uncle Sandro really mistaken for a partisan, or was his killer someone closer to home? Does it matter if Jan just fills in the gaps? After all, Beatrice said she could do as she liked with the story, she even said 'I give it to you' . . . Written with a deep understanding of loyalty and temptation, I Give It To You is a riveting novel about who owns a story, whether we have a right to what we inherit, and what a gift really means.

About the Author

Valerie Martin is the author of eleven novels, including I Give It To You, Italian Fever and Property, which won the Women's Prize for Fiction. She has also written three collections of short fiction and a biography of Saint Francis of Assisi, Salvation. She has been awarded grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, as well as the Kafka Prize for Mary Reilly.