Ugh, here we have a relationship based not on two people talking and getting to know each other but on (for the man) simply looking at the woman and liking how she makes him feel, and (for the woman) a human connection that is mostly a distraction/escape, whether temporary or permanent, from her sad reality. Yet we're supposed to believe this is an epic, fated, superlove. Bleh. He likes her because she's beautiful and mysterious and fragile and broken, and because she's the only one he can share his big secret with. Those things are all about HIM, not her. *thumbs down* All day it has been threatening rain, but there have been several grey days like this without a drop, so he hasn’t bothered with an umbrella or raincoat. But only twenty yards or so from the entrance the heavens finally open, like a bad joke. There is no warning, only the sudden chaos of the downpour, rain smoking across the pavement towards him. Instantly his hair, shirt and suit are drenched. If he appeared bedraggled before he must seem now like something that has crawled its way out of the Tiber. He swears. A woman, emerging from one of the sleek cars, darts an alarmed glance in his direction and hurries in through the doorway.

There is a twist towards the end which I didn’t see coming and helped move the book in a completely different direction to the one i was expecting. I was very pleased with how it ended and thought it was a very appropriate ending for the book. The Invitation is definitely one of those books that takes you to another time and place. I really felt like I was travelling through post war Europe with the characters, experiencing all the sights with them. I now really hope to travel through Europe at some point and visit all the countries they did.Stella is an invited guest. She is alone. She is very mysterious and Hal is drawn to her. They spend the evening together, but Stella disappears the next day. Someone once told me,’ she says then, ‘that a party is only an event if there is at least one interesting gatecrasher in attendance.’ She raises her eyebrows, continuing to study him. ‘ Are you a gatecrasher?’ No,’ he says, ‘I’m not.’ Half-Italian – but he won’t say that. The less you say, the fewer questions you invite. It is something to live by.

And post WWII Europe is a place that allows for endless stories, recoving from the war, social mobility, women's rights, voting rights, technological advancement etc. Hachette Book Group is a leading book publisher based in New York and a division of Hachette Livre, the third-largest publisher in the world. Social Media Now Fede is expounding his idea. ‘And think of all those rich women, looking for a little excitement.’ He winks. ‘Trust me, amico, it’s the best Christmas present I could give you.’Which brings me to why I don't get why Hal was so very into her. He was willing to think the worst of her husband and see her as the embodiment of all that was good. Much good it did him in the end. Hal and Stella are the two main characters of this book and we follow both their stories lines, both past and present, as their paths cross. First in Rome for one night they both can't forget, and then 2 years later aboard a yacht set for Cannes. Hal has been invited along by the Contessa as a journalist to report for a magazine on the glamourous lives of those on the yacht, and Stella is there as the wife of one of the major investors in the film. Stella is with her husband who is an investor for the film. Hal is on the yacht to do a story. Hal did not know that Stella was married. Oh no! He fishes a card from his bag. Hal takes it, turns it over in his hand, studies the embossed gold lettering. And he thinks: Why not? What, after all, does he have to lose? December I dislike the structure of third-person narration that allows the reader to know all the character's thoughts EXCEPT when the author wants to strategically keep a secret from the reader (e.g., "It reminded him of that one traumatic afternoon he spent at the sea with his father, a point that is hugely important to the story that's unfolding, but he didn't want to think about that now, tra la la"). I get that this is how you structure a book so it has something that keeps your audience reading and wondering, but too often this setup of making a reader want/need to find out what some big secret is turns out to be the *only* momentum the book has, and that's disappointing. Now, characters who need to find out the secrets of other characters? Fine. Stories in which characters need to solve mysteries for themselves? Great (especially if those mysteries are *about* themselves). Stories with no secrets at all? Even better. (Not everything needs to have a mystery or a twist!) But this false way of selective revelation and teasing is almost always off-putting to me.

Of course, there is a more recent time that must be banished from conversation and thought. The war meant humiliation, tragedy. It meant hardship and poverty too. People want prosperity now, they want nice clothes, food on the table, things. It is the same in England. There was the jubilation over the victory, the hailing of the returned heroes. And then there was the great forgetting. However, I did struggle with pacing, skimming through filler scenes and connecting with the characters. This, ultimately, hampered my enjoyment level.

The guests on the yacht are the beautiful but precocious leading lady, the drunken male lead, the director, photographer and the loud American who is the sponsor for the film and his beautiful, but familiar wife...... Stella! But a year later they are unexpectedly thrown together, after Hal receives an invitation he cannot resist. An Italian Contessa asks him to assist on a trip of a lifetime — acting as a reporter on a tremendous yacht, skimming its way along the Italian coast toward Cannes film festival, the most famous artists and movie stars of the day gathered to promote a new film. The doorman turns to her, triumphant but obsequious. ‘This man, my Contessa, he is not who he says he is.’ On the other side of my terrace, the view is straight out across the Atlantic. I like to be up to watch the blue-hulled fishing boats setting out in the young hours and then, at dusk, heading home laden with the day’s catch. It lends a rhythm to the day. I know the moods of the sea now almost as well as those fishermen, and there are many. I like to watch the weather travelling in from the outer reaches: the approach of the occasional storm. Rome 1953: Hal and Stella meet by chance at a glittering party hosted by the Contessa, a fundraiser for her film project.

I hate them. These falsely dramatic sentence fragments. That try to create tension. By stuttering in this way. Annoyingly. An evocative love story set along the Italian Riviera about a group of charismatic stars who all have secrets and pasts they try desperately--and dangerously--to hide. For a vertiginous moment, he feels that he is floating above it all. Then the ground reforms itself beneath him; he begins to look around. There are palms and shrubs, the smell of the earth after the rain. He gropes for the word for it: petrichor. When the city is like this, Hal does not mind being poor. To live in such a place is in itself a form of richness. He is self-sufficient. He has a job, he has no dependants, he has somewhere to sleep at night. A small bedsit in downmarket Trastevere, fine, but it is enough to call home. So different from the life he would have had in England that he might be living on another planet. This suits him perfectly. I think I let out an audible groan when a second, parallel narration appeared, and then a sneaky third one later on. It felt lazy? I don't know.No,’ Hal says. ‘I’ll be staying here.’ He knows his mother, in particular, will be disappointed. But he doesn’t want to face her worry for him, his father’s pointed questions about when he is going to make something of himself. This book is so conflicting. I wanted to like this book a lot. The setting is interesting, the cover is stunning, the era is interesting, but there is just too much of could have been. Set in the film world of 1950s along the Italian Riviera, author Lucy Foley sweeps readers up into a world of luxury at the Cannes Film Festival.