Valerie Thornhill's 1955 The Summer When… recalls a remarkable adventure of travelling across Europe by herself at a time that it was almost unthinkable for a young woman.

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 Europe was recovering from 6 long years of war, 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: A committed writer since childhood, her 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