Bryan Cavanaugh, former Australian navy man and lawyer, works on a wealthy man's yacht in the early 1950s, assigned to protect the man's Italian wife, a descendant of nobility, and they begin an affair, separate, and meet again 40 years later.
****
Publishers Weekly Review: A fable of star-crossed lovers, this smoothly written tale by master novelist West ( The Shoes of the Fisherman ) begins in the years just after WW II. Bryan de Courcy Cavanagh, a young Irish-Australian, is hired to crew aboard a yacht owned by rich American Lou Molloy, who has planned a pleasure cruise with his fiancee Principessa Giulia Farnese. The marriage will be one of convenience, arranged by the Farnese family, whose lineage was established before the Renaissance, by the hierarchy of the Catholic Church and by Molloy, to facilitate new alliances in the political maneuverings of the Cold War era. Cavanagh and Giulia fall passionately in love, aware that each of the stolen minutes they share aboard the yacht brings them closer to the inevitable decision to part. Four decades later, Cavanagh is reunited with Giulia and learns the secret she has kept for all those years. While the plot is predictable, West spins his narrative as a glowing thread of love lost and regained, woven through a rich tapestry of intrigue, betrayal, suspense and murder. ( )