1955 The Summer When… recalls the thrill and apprehension of a student invited, on the first long vacation, to stay with her professor in Paris. Travelling across a continent recovering from six years of war, she gets into scrapes through her naively optimistic attitude, dented by actual experience of people and life in general. As she embarks on this journey into adulthood, she meets Parisian intellectuals, Russian refugees, a Spanish bullfighter, Italian mafiosi, an SS recruit and other students on individual quests for diversion, consolation and love. In 1955 travel was by steam train, there was no mass tourism, no contraceptive pill, television was in its infancy, the age of consent was twenty-one and the internet didn’t exist! ‘...an engagingly honest account of her roller-coaster adventures across Europe by a Fifties girl before the feminist movement began.’ About the author After graduating from Cambridge, Valerie Thornhill returned to France and Italy. While studying in Paris she lived through the student protest movement and later - when working in Rome - inadvertently became entangled with the underworld during the Red Brigades era of the Sixties. She went on to lecture on art, architecture and garden history in North America, Asia and Europe. Recently Valerie has received national recognition for services to adult education in Yorkshire and for founding an educational and cultural organisation, VISTA. A committed writer since childhood, her recent novel, In Restoration, (also published as e-book) was awarded the People's Book Prize for Fiction in 2012. She divides her time between England and Italy where she has created her own symbolic garden. Find out more about the author and her other publications at www.valeriethornhill.org.uk and at www.pergolapress.co.uk