The wonderful Angela Petch was a guest author at one of our writing retreats in Abruzzo. She delivered an amazing workshop to our writers on historical research followed up by a book signing at a local Italian restaurant. She read an excerpt from her latest book ‘The Tuscan Secret’. Much wine and antipasti had by all!
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Angela Petch is a USA Today bestselling author and an award-winning writer of fiction and the occasional poem. Every summer she leaves her home in West Sussex, England to reside in the Tuscan Apennines for six months where she and her husband own a renovated watermill. Her historical fiction novels include The Tuscan House, A Tuscan Memory, The Tuscan Girl and The Tuscan Secret. Her latest The Postcard from Italy was published last month.
Her love affair with Italy was born at the age of seven when she moved with her family to Rome where she lived for six years. Her father worked for the Commonwealth War Graves Commission and he made sure she learned Italian and visited many places during that time.
Later on she studied Italian at the University of Kent at Canterbury and afterwards worked in Sicily, where she met her husband. His Italian mother and British father met in Urbino in 1944 and married after a war-time romance.
She wanted to write "The Tuscan Secret" not only for her amazing mother-in-law, Giuseppina, but also to make people aware of the courage of the resistance fighters and the generous hospitality shown by the poorest of families, including relatives of Italian neighbours in their corner of war-torn Tuscany. But she also carries her phone in her back pocket to capture locations and details for her stories.