For Renata

A story of enduring love spanning four decades, set against the picturesque backdrop of Cape Ann, Massachusetts, For Renata is a 75,000 word, up-market women fiction novel for readers of Me Before You by Jojo Moyes and Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe by Fannie Flagg. It is 1957. At 16, Mamãe leaves Portugal for her arranged marriage to fisherman Inacio Raposo. But when she arrives at Gloucester, Massachusetts, she discovers that she is already carrying the baby of her childhood sweetheart Mateus. Inacio believes that Renata Raposo is born prematurely and, for a time, the young family live happily. But he later learns the truth and subjects both mother and daughter to a life of humiliating abuse. Years later, in the turbulence of the Vietnam era, young Peter Ahearn has lost an arm, an eye and a fiancée. He retreats to the isolation of his new job as light keeper and struggles to find the courage to end his life. But his quirky, elderly neighbor Bridey Gallagher insinuates herself into Peter life, prodding the young recluse to find new purpose. Over time, Peter discovers new reason to live and his lot continues to improve & right up until the day he vanishes. Now, 60-year-old Peter has resurfaced at a V.A. soldiers home, his mind ravaged by dementia. No one knows what happened to him or why until his nephew Mark Valente discovers a journal Peter kept during the 1970s. It chronicles Peter's extraordinary love affair with the beautiful yet tormented young Renata. And it contains an astonishing confession; something Mark decides Renata deserves to know. But Mark is stunned when Renata denies that an affair ever took place, and he left to question whether anything his uncle wrote is true. Now he must connect past to present, and piece together a picture of what really happened decades before. And he must grapple with his own burgeoning infatuation with the now middle-aged, enigmatic beauty. For Renata is the tale of two damaged souls who find each other at a time, not so long ago, when lighthouses had keepers instead of computers, people knocked on doors instead of texted and to need someone wasn't considered a sign of weakness.