Cantabrian Summer, Baltic Winter

About the Book

A chance encounter while shopping in a northern Spanish fishing port draws delectable, half-French, half-Polish Tamara von Rosenberg into friendship with Martin Haynes, a freelance writer and translator living in a nearby village. Their relationship, kindled through mutual intellectual interests, soon blossoms into caring, passionate affection. Tamara's idyllic holiday in Cantabria is brought to a premature and unhappy end when news reaches her that her widower father is dying following an inexplicable road accident on a remote Polish country lane.

Tamara and Martin try in vain to solve the mystery of Ruben's death. Meanwhile, Tamara's perseverance with her late father's ambition to transform a derelict 19th century mansion into a nursing home is met with spiteful opposition. Certain individuals will resort to radical means to wrest the property from her hands.

Poland plunges into a bleak and bitter winter of political turmoil and economic chaos amid growing opposition to the government's positive stance of future European Union membership. Nationalistic sympathies run high, and there is a renaissance of historic feuds. Tamara and Martin soon discover that staying alive in remote Rybkowo is a formidable challenge.

About the Author

Dr. Mike Bent was born near Manchester in 1956, but spent most of his formative years living in deep rural Somerset. He read Geography at Downing College, Cambridge, and Transport Studies at Cranfield Institute of Technology, Bedfordshire. In 1987 he abandoned England in favour of northern Spain, then spent three years in northeast Poland. Having endured many years teaching various foregn languages to increasingly recalcitrant pupils (both in spain and Poland), he is now a full-time correspondent for a number of European rail transport and technology journals. He has also written several books on Norwegian and Spanish public transport history, as well as a guide book to northern Spain. At present he is preparing a series of books in Spanish on the regional history of Spanish railways, as well as working on a second novel. In his spare time (frustratingly limited) he enjoys gardening, cooking (and consuming the end products thereof), walking, reading, and exploring the byways of rural Europe by car and train. He lives in an old house of great character and much woodworm in an Arcadian valley in the Principalidad de Asturias, in northern Spain.