William Rivière Books In Order

Novels

Watercolour Sky (1990)
A Venetian Theory of Heaven (1992)
Eros and Psyche (1994)
Borneo Fire (1995)
Echoes of War (1997)
Kate Caterina (2001)
By the Grand Canal (2004)

Novels Book Covers

William Rivière Books Overview

Eros and Psyche

When Imogen Scottow takes her baby daughter to stay with her godmother, Laura, on her Greek estate for the summer, she still refuses to reveal the identity of Angelica’s father. Her tranquillity is shattered and her freedom threatened, however, when a family friend of Laura’s unexpectedly arrives.

Kate Caterina

When Kate Fenn marries a young Italian medical student in London in the mid thirties she finds herself, as Caterina d’Alessandria, in Tuscany when World War II breaks out. With her brother and brother in law in opposing armies, a husband imprisoned for his anti Fascist activities and a small daughter to protect, Kate Caterina struggles to hold on to her sense of identity and her faith in a better future. This is a story of love, sacrifice and betrayal which gives a striking impression of what it was like to live through the war, and especially the civil war, in Italy.

By the Grand Canal

By the Grand Canal is an exquisite novel redolent of Venice and the haze of WWI from William Rivi re, the author of the award winning Kate Caterina. In the aftermath of the First World War, Hugh Thurne, a British diplomat involved in the peace negotiations, finds solace in his rented palazzo in Venice rather than returning to his wife and the charade of his marriage in London. Although profoundly disturbed about the long term prospects for peace, he has faith in the city’s power to raise his spirits. Hugh eagerly looks forward to visits with his old friends Giacomo and Valentina Venier in their dilapidated palazzo on the Grand Canal; to dallying with a young opera singer, Emanuela; and to the arrival of Violet Mancroft, the widow of his best friend lost in the war. What he does not anticipate is the shadow lying over the Venier family’s future. Nor has he reckoned with the vagaries of his own human heart. Evoking the beauty of Venice, this is a novel about premonition for the future and the war it portends, about death and memory, and also about an unexpected love between two old friends.