The Sting of Love — Janet Graber

Georgina is on a visit to her widowed father in England to celebrate his seventy-seventh birthday, decades after he fought in WWII. She is astonished when he asks if she will accompany him back to Trieste, in Northern Italy. He has always refused to set foot in Europe again. What changed? And why now? Captain James Drummond survived the battlefields of North Africa and Italy. Instead of his anticipated return home to wife and four-year-old daughter whom he had yet to meet, he was assigned to the grim task of military occupation in Trieste. On a summer patrol in 1945 in the disputed hills above Trieste, he encountered a group of Yugoslav partisans, bathing. When he glimpsed a woman emerging from the pool, water cascading down her body, a new conflict emerges with no clear lines, one he had to navigate alone. The war-weary Captain was faced with heart-wrenching choices. Meanwhile, Georgina faces her own demons— a stale marriage, a secret affair, and her father's new revelations. Weaving historical facts with fictional characters, The Sting of Love moves seamlessly between Georgina's tumultuous life and that of her father in the aftermath of WWII, viewed through the lens of their several weeks together in Trieste.