Teddy Huntley Carlyle from Dallas, Texas has always dreamed of a glamorous and exciting life elsewhere. So when she meets and marries David, his job drawing them to Rome, it seems like this dream might finally be becoming reality, as she is swept into the heart of the elite diplomatic circles of the American community in 1960s Italy. But Teddy has her secrets and, one evening at an embassy party, it seems like her past may finally be about to catch up with her. Things go from bad to worse, and to fix things, it looks like she may just have to get in over her head.

This goes deeper and darker than I expected, making for a transportive and entertaining but also highly compelling read. Yes, there’s summer sun, glamour, sizzle and scandal, but there’s also family secrets, sexism and men abusing their power over women, expectations placed on women at the time, the versions of ourselves we put forward to others to succeed and the strain this causes, and the agency ultimately needed to regain control of the narrative. Moving back and forth in time, between an interrogation and Teddy’s story that brings us to this point, the story slowly builds tension towards what we know will be some explosive event.

Teddy is a complex and multi-layered character. Brought up in a cocooned and privileged environment, she yearns for independence but then doesn’t always seem to know what to do with it. Naive at times (or seeming so anyway) but ambitious, glamorous but also slightly messy, unwilling to settle but also making a lot of questionable choices, divulging her worries, vulnerabilities and mistakes to the reader, but also at times coming across as impenetrable and composed as could be, knowing exactly what she’s doing and not giving away more than she wants to.

Great detail is given to dress and interior decor, and Dunlay takes delight in walking us through Rome’s rich historical, cultural and luxury urbanscape of the time. In Teddy, Dunlay has created an intriguing character, constantly trying to outrun the past that has shaped her, whose story unfolds in a city drenched in heat, art, elegance and luxury, and bubbling with an undercurrent of deception and manipulation, where things, and people, are often not what they seem.

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Teddy is published on July 4th by 4th Estate. Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for the DRC.

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Born and raised in Dallas, Texas, Emily Dunlay studied English literature and creative writing at Princeton University, after which she trained and worked as a specialist librarian for antiquarian books. She currently lives in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Teddy is her first book.