Fanciful and bordering on romantic, Montefiore writes a nice little story. It's in that Rosamund Pilcher/Maeve Benchley/Barbara Delinsky mode, but set a great deal in France just after WW2. I liked the characers, though for some reasons Montefiore (who is a woman) writing about sex from a man's point of view made me uncomfortable. The threads of story all wrap up tidily but the interweaving is interesting. I did go to look up Titian's The Gypsy Madonna (pictured) which now hands at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna just to check it out, even though the one in this story was supposed to be a long lost one.

From the Publisher

When an elegant French antiques dealer dies in her adopted hometown of New York City, her son, Misha, is astonished to learn that she owned a priceless, uncataloged Titian known as The Gypsy Madonna. Misha wonders how she could have kept such a secret from him, bonded inseparably as they were since his childhood in German-occupied France. Now with the discovery of the Titian masterpiece and the loss of his mother, he must at last journey back to Bordeaux to uncover the truth about The Gypsy Madonna -- and himself.