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Miss Wells

rank: 427

Last week's position: 474

first registered 27.12.09

last online 7 mins ago

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about me

wellsviolet@yahoo.co.uk

favourite books

Now reading
The past is Myself
If This is a Man
History

Massive thanks to the dashing Mr Wind for my covers.

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my books

Burnt Ochre

Violet Wells

When an artist forges an old master painting for the Gestapo she enters a world where nothing and no one is what they seem.


Isabella Blunt, an Italian woman married to an English art historian, hides from the fact of war in her studio. Until one day she is offered a commission that will force her out of her ivory castle.

When later the boy she is using as a model is arrested in connection with a bomb attack on a brothel frequented by German soldiers and the secret police arrive at her door she is forced to begin to question all the loyalties that root her to the person she has always believed herself to be.

In Florence in 1944 appearances are deceitful. It is a city of informers, spies, torturers, insurgents, exiles and renegades in hiding. But no one can be trusted to be who they say they are.

 

Ponte Santa Trinita

Violet Wells

The temptation to betray a secret is always there, always exhaling its hot intimate breath in your ear.


Mario Carità was the most sadistic of the SS torturers in Florence during the second world war. It was his job to extract secrets.

On the death of her father Zinnia St Aubyn finds a journal. The journal is written by an English sculptor living in Florence who has fallen in love with an Italian dancer and so refuses to leave Italy at the outbreak of war in 1940. He is soon forced to assume a false identity to avoid capture by the fascist authorities. He becomes Jewish, because Jews in Italy were forbidden to join the armed forces but were otherwise left relatively in peace. Until the Nazis arrived in 1943.


The journal will lead Zinnia back to Florence and into the web of her own closely guarded secret.

PST is about the relationship between secrets and identity – how we both gain and lose identity in relation to the secrets we protect or disclose. And it’s about the narrative bridges in life, the butterfly effect over time of one rash decision or moment of hesitation. .

 

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latest

RossClark1981 wrote 2 hours ago

Thanks, Lady. And for your kind comment on the thread. I think I'l....

FRAN MACILVEY wrote 3 days ago

Have a wonderful day! :-D

Maria Constantine wrote 3 days ago

Violet, your position on the ED is very well-earned and deserving; I ....

Davidmauriceware wrote 3 days ago

Hello gifted writer, I would like to take this time to personally inv....

Mademoiselle Nobel wrote 5 days ago

Hi Violet! Congrats on Burnt Ochre doing so superbly! I cannot wai....

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my comments

latest

I wrote 11 days ago

Really nice writing with a good poise and lightness of step to it. Love all the detail. The world you're creating quickly comes to life. The contrast between the supernatural and everyday is done really well. Especially like the rather prosaic sentances in that respect the rates were fair and the s... view book

I wrote 109 days ago

Lovely crisp clean writing, vibrant and precise like tracks in fresh snow. There’s an immediacy about the tone, a nice balance between sophistication and vulnerability, which swiftly sinks us into the narrative. I like the theme of learning a new language – it’s a tremendously eloquent imperative of... view book

I wrote 117 days ago

Absolutely brilliant opening chapter. Without question some of the best writing I’ve encountered here. Pulses with life and all the detail is fabulously observed, with a fresh and penetrating eye. Traction’s top notch too, with an effortless sense of every sentence inevitably breeding the next. Beau... view book

I wrote 119 days ago

Gosh, this is fabulous. The prose thrillingly and effortlessly beautiful. It’s clever and witty and brilliantly put together. I love the cinematic shifts to odd camera angles, how you dwarf and fluster Gina out in the world which conversely and cleverly makes her grow in stature as a character. Your... view book

I wrote 119 days ago

We warm quickly to the narrator whose wry intimate tone has bags of charm. First chapter is immensely successful in every regard. The second chapter I reckon you ought to sow in later in the book, perhaps as dialogue. It feels a bit like we’ve stopped in a car park. Chapter three is back on track ag... view book

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