A Book of Secrets: Illegitimate Daughters, Absent Fathers

A Time Top Ten Nonfiction Book of 2011
A Seattle Times Best Book of 2011

On a hill above the Italian village of Ravello sits the Villa Cimbrone, a place of fantasy and make-believe. The characters who move through Michael Holroyd's A Book of Secrets are destined never to meet, yet the Villa Cimbrone and one man unite them all.

This elegiac work is about the quest of unearthing and recounting the stories of women always on the periphery of the respectable …