If Only: A Novel

How can you know someone until you learn to talk about the past?

Letty and Alf are the only English speakers in an Italian class in Rome, where they discover that the language that really connects them is dance. Alf is nineteen, a former ballroom champion who seems reassuringly confident and at ease with himself. Letty, twenty-two, is unusually reserved and studious, having been forced to give up her childhood dream of becoming a ballet dancer. They come from different worlds, but when they waltz around the Piazza Navona together, a passionate relationship begins.

Can their decision to live in the moment in the Eternal City keep their histories from encroaching? Why is Alf living in a shared apartment, estranged from his family? And what has wrenched Letty away from the apparent security of her Oxford University degree? They each find themselves haunted by the fear that the secrets not yet shared will tear them apart.

If Only is a novel about identity, secrets, passion and dance—and the indefinable collision of physical, emotional and intellectual excitement that we call falling in love.