page_title: Summer's Lease
section_title: Novel summary
hierarchical_section_title: Summer's Lease / Novel summary
caption_attribution_description: English: The Flagellation by Piero della Francesca. Source: [1]
context_page_description: Summer's Lease is a novel by Sir John Mortimer, author of the Rumpole novels, which is set predominantly in Italy. It was first published in 1988 and made into a British television mini-series, first shown in 1989. The title "Summer's Lease" is a play on a line from William Shakespeare's Sonnet 18: And summer's lease hath all too short a date. The novel involves the leasing of a Tuscan villa for the summer holidays. It is divided into six parts: "Preparations", "Arrival", "First Week", "Second Week", "Third Week", and "The Return".
context_section_description: Molly Pargeter is a forty-something wife, and mother of three girls, who leads a stable but dull life in 1980s West London. She feels overweight and there is no passion in her relationship with her husband Hugh, who is secretly seeing another woman. For most of her life she has found escape in detective novels and books on art, especially about the fifteenth-century Italian fresco painter Piero della Francesca.
  In a newspaper advertisement, Molly sees that a villa in Tuscany is to let and, after travelling to Italy to view the villa, "La Felicita", in the fictional town of Mondano, she decides to rent it for her family's August holiday. The villa is conveniently located for visits to the artistic centres of Florence and Siena, and also to Urbino, a day's drive away across the "Mountains of the Moon", where what Kenneth Clark called the world's greatest small picture awaits Molly: Piero's "Flagellation".
  Water problems emerge in the first week of the holiday: the swimming pool becomes empty and there is no running water in the villa. In the second week, when the body of the ex-pat letting agent is discovered, also in an empty swimming pool, Molly suspects foul play. She becomes more involved with the local town of Mondano and its inhabitants: an aristocrat, a wealthy socialite, and several ex-pats who all seem to be hiding something, and is intrigued about the identity of the villa's absent owner, whom she knows only as "S. Kettering".
  The search for the reason behind the disappearing water and the corpse, and discovering who S. Kettering is, becomes an obsession which leads Molly across the "Mountains of the Moon" to encounter more than just the small painting.
caption: The Flagellation of Christ by Piero della Francesca, one of the recurring motifs in the novel and the TV series.
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