The Violet Field

She went to Florence to be photographed being happy. He put the camera down.

Clara Ashby is excellent at being looked at. Composer, gallery darling, fiancée-to-be of Asheville's most eligible curator - she has a caption ready for every feeling and a performance ready for every room. A summer at a crumbling Florentine pensione is supposed to be content: golden hour, the Duomo, a tasteful ring waiting at home.

Then a stranger gives up his room with a view so she can have it - and never mentions it again.

Leo Emerson photographs dying reefs for a living and doesn't post anything. He asks the questions that come in dressed as banter and turn out to be real. He notices the composition notebook she carries like contraband. And in a violet field above Fiesole, for the length of one kiss, Clara stops narrating her own life - right before her chaperone walks up the path and everything closes like a drawer.

Back home, the perfect ring fits perfectly. That should not feel like a warning.

Torn between the seamless life that was storyboarded for her and the man who has never once asked her to perform, Clara has to decide whether she wants to be admired - or known. Some views are worth crossing an ocean for twice.

A sweeping contemporary retelling of E. M. Forster's A Room with a View, told across three years, two continents, and one field of violets that only blooms if you come back exactly right.

Readers can expect:

• A slow burn with an explosive emotional payoff
• The wrong fiancé and the right stranger
• A heroine reclaiming her art
• A laconic hero who says everything by putting the camera down
• Meddling aunts, a sandwich-evangelist brother, and an Italian landlady whose silences could be published
• A guaranteed happily ever after