Helen has turned eleven and her sunshine, young girl's world is beginning to darken around the edges. It is summer and she is in Bella Terra, a beautiful island off the Italian coast where her family spend an idyllic few months in their villa each year. This time, though, everything is different.

Her parents' marriage is simmering with deep-rooted, unfathomable, tension. Lea, her precocious thirteen-year-old sister, is heading off for unknown - adult - shores leaving Helen forlornly behind. The Ashtons arrive in the midst of this. Prue, a school friend of Helen's mother, is glamorous and alluringly worldly; her husband, a mysterious, eerie figure. As the sultry Mediterranean shimmers and steams, each one plays out their own secret drama.

It will be a hot, blue summer, a summer of love affairs, heart break and loss of innocence. And it will ultimately lead to Lea's disappearance ...

Uncoiling with foreboding and inevitability, The Forgotten Island builds up to the haunting moment when a young girl's life is changed forever. Evocative, nuanced, sensual, this is mesmerizing storytelling.