Philip Platts 
Marietta’s Gift 

Two lives torn apart and a stranger offering new hope. But is the stranger an impostor? Wealthy businessman Hugo Whiting has built a wall of protection around himself after the death of his wife — a wall that comes crashing down when he unexpectedly meets his first love Marietta Forsberg at an overseas conference.At first, Hugo simply wants to discover why Marietta vanished from his life forty years earlier, leaving only a letter begging him not to try to find her. But Marietta’s revelations — and accusations — leave him reeling. As he begins to recover from the shocks, Hugo hopes there may still be a future for the two of them. What he doesn’t know is that the key to his own future may well lie in the hands of someone else — a stranger who turns up at his home uninvited. The teenage boy claims to have survived Rio de Janeiro’s tough streets as a child and to have travelled half way across the world to find him. Refusing to believe the story the boy tells him, Hugo twice sends him packing. Very soon, though, he realises this mysterious visitor might be his only route to the truth. The problem is the boy has now disappeared. Marietta’s Gift is an extraordinary and compelling story of a search for truth that crosses two continents and the gulf between people with enormous wealth and those who have nothing. ‘A beautifully written and heart-warming novel’ — Maurizio Ascari, author of Faded Letters