Publisher's Synopsis
There was no moon the night Rhonda vanished. When he awakes from the darkness, her husband suspects she has escaped to Italy. Her passport, mobile phone, and credit cards are missing, along with a suitcase and some of her clothes. If they had not been approaching their 70th birthdays, it might be considered a mid-life crisis.
Believing his wife wants to be found, JP sets off on a voyage, retracing their past summers in Italy. This story of enduring love and the fragility of old age is comic and tragic in equal measure. Love ceases not when a soul its freedom wins. The Blue above the Trees takes inspiration from Isabella, or the Pot of Basil, by John Keats, a poem that was itself inspired by a tale from Boccaccio's Decameron. Each of the narratives tell a poignant tale of lost love. All things to end are made. Life and plague alike, fondness and fear, admiration and desperation. And the last of these to pass shall be love.Unsurprisingly, this lyrical lockdown tale of lost love opens alliteratively, with bedrooms, butterflies, and Bellagio. There follows a voyage of discovery, much the same as in Keats's Isabella. When the full morning came, she had devised
how she might secret to the forest hie;
how she might find the clay, so dearly prized,
and sing to it one latest lullaby; Keats found inspiration for his poem in Boccaccio. Once she got up that morning, having no wish to say anything to her brothers, she determined to go to the place he had shown her and to see if what she had seen in her dream were true. And The Blue above the Trees takes inspiration from both Boccaccio and Keats. The smell of Basil and Bougainvillea is what now summoned him from a distant land. He knows he will find her hidden within that fragrance.
