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There’s something about talking to a writer that makes people so uncomfortable they babble stories in self-defense. They seem to imagine that novelists go about sniffing drains and peeking through curtains in search of material, that they are constantly in need of characters …

I Give It To You Valerie Martin

‘Do you like it?’ she said. ‘I give it to you.’

Jan Vidor arrives at Villa Chiara intent on learning Italian, touring the Tuscan hill towns and casting about for a subject for her next novel. She is well acquainted with strangers offering their personal histories for her fiction, but when her aristocratic host Beatrice makes a passing remark about violent events at the villa during World War II, Jan wants to know more.

For Jan, her friend’s family history is irresistible. It doesn’t occur to her that Beatrice regrets having told it, or that she might consider Jan’s version a betrayal of trust. Isn’t stealing other people’s lives the business of a novelist? Jan has no illusions about the answer to this question. It’s yes. It’s always yes.

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.

‘Martin writes with amplitude, precision, grace and wit.’ Margaret Atwood

‘She always produces something unexpected and revelatory.’ Jane Smiley

Valerie Martin is the author of ten novels, including The Ghost of the Mary Celeste, Mary Reilly, Italian Fever and Property, which won the Orange Prize for Fiction. She has also written three collections of short fiction including Sea Lovers, and a biography of Saint Francis of Assisi, Salvation.

Fiction £14.99 Demy hardback ISBN: 978 1 78125 553 7 288pp eISBN: 978 1 78283 209 6 August 2020 UK Com ex Can Exclusive Europe