Lillian has had to make the hardest decision a woman can make. In war-torn Australia in 1947, she is forced to choose between her baby daughter and the love of her life, an Italian prisoner-of-war. She flees to Italy to make a new life in an act of love that haunts her for fifty years.

An unexpected meeting in Rome, decades later, with her abandoned daughter Francesca sets in motion a new chapter in both their lives.

Set between rural New South Wales and Italy, The Italian Romance examines the choices we make and their unexpected consequences. In this moving novel about families and the different faces of love, Joanne Carroll reminds us what it is to be human.