Sperenza

May 2011. One morning Audrey, a London bookseller nearing fifty and mother of teenage twins, stops short when she hears the headlines on the news: Marlo von Graf, the glamorous Franco-Swiss novelist adored by millions for her dark, unsettling books, has drowned in Lake Annecy near the chalet she shared with her husband.
Suicide? Accident? Nobody knows.

Audrey’s connection to Marlo goes back to the 1980s, when they met at Norwich University. Back then Audrey was the radiant star of campus life, envied for her beauty and charm, while Marlo was an outsider, who remained in the shadows. Their brief collaboration — a project on Oscar Wilde’s tragic final days in Paris — ended in rivalry and estrangement.

Now, decades later, Audrey is astonished to learn that Marlo has named her in her will. Summoned to Annecy, she comes face to face with Marlo’s widower — Laszlo, Audrey’s first love, the man she has never forgotten.

Among Marlo’s effects lies an unfinished manuscript — a disturbing text that revives their youthful competition, rekindles old passions, and unearths secrets long buried. Was Marlo writing truth, or spinning one last fiction? And why, after all these years, did she leave everything in Audrey’s hands?

Speranza is at once a love story, a literary mystery, and the portrait of two women as different as sun and moon — a haunting tribute to Oscar Wilde, with echoes of Daphne du Maurier, set to the soundtrack of the 1980s.