Lynne Shelby on Ten Years of Writing and Her Novel Set in Venice

Wendy reviews books set in Italy. For more articles like this one, subscribe to her Substack channel Italy Writers and get in touch via Sunflower Publishing.

The boat comes in low over the water. Then the city appears, all at once, as if it had been waiting there the whole time. Lynne Shelby remembers that arrival vividly, and it’s the reason her eighth novel exists at all.

“You just see it,” she tells me. “Floating between the sky and the sea.” A big birthday, a trip booked on a whim, and that was that. She knew she wanted to write a book set there. It just took a few more novels to get round to it.

A Venice Summer came out in May 2026. Behind it sits a career that started, by Shelby’s own admission, almost by accident.

A rejection letter at fourteen, a win a decade ago

She can’t remember not writing. Little green exercise books at school. A manuscript sent off at fourteen to Puffin, the children’s publisher, which came back with a no. But the editor who sent that no also sent a letter so encouraging that Shelby kept it, and kept writing, for years afterwards.

Then, in November 2014, a competition. Accent Press and Woman magazine were looking for unpublished, unagented writers of women’s fiction. Shelby, recently made redundant, sent in three chapters. She more or less forgot about it after that. You do, with competitions.

January 2015. She’s home alone. The phone rings.

It’s an editor from Accent Press. She’s won.

“I absolutely screeched down the phone,” she says, laughing at the memory. Her husband was at work. Her kids were at college or at school. She couldn’t think who to call, so she waited, alone with the news, until the family got home and found her dancing round the kitchen.

That novel, French Kissing, became her debut. Seven books followed over the next ten years, most recently 2025’s Dancing In The Moonlight, and along the way Shelby has written for both a traditional publisher and, more recently, for herself as an independent author.

She won’t say one route beats the other. An editor once talked her out of ageing up a heroine from twenty four to thirty, and Shelby, convinced the character worked better young, pushed back and won that argument. Independent publishing gave her the final say on covers and titles instead. “There’s no one size fits all really,” she says, and leaves it at that.

Rose, Marietta and a portrait that won’t stay finished

Here’s the plot, briefly. Rose is an art conservator, newly out of a difficult relationship, sent to Venice to restore a private collection inside a Grand Canal palazzo. The palazzo’s owner, Luca, comes from Venice’s old ruling families and carries himself, in Shelby’s phrase, a bit like an arrogant Mr Darcy. They don’t get on. Then, slowly, they do.

That’s the surface of it. Underneath, something else is happening. As Rose peels back the layers of paint on an old portrait, the story cuts to 1536 and to Marietta, the woman the portrait shows, whose life is entirely at the mercy of a father not to be kept waiting.

Two timelines, run properly side by side rather than folded into one another. Marietta’s sections sit in present tense. Rose’s stay in past tense. Even the vocabulary changes between the two, which Shelby did on purpose, drawing on a year of art history study from long before she started writing fiction. The painter himself doesn’t exist, though Shelby built him out of real Renaissance figures she’d researched closely. What the two women share, a father’s word on one side and a woman working out what she actually wants on the other, is where the book quietly does its best work.

Dual timeline novels are notoriously difficult to hold together. This one holds.

Pen names, star ratings and a piece of advice worth repeating

A pen name, first. Lynne Shelby isn’t her real name, adopted on early advice that a public writing career sits more comfortably apart from a private family one. She reads the five star reviews. She skips the rest, without apology, on the reasoning that a book which misses for one reader can still be exactly right for another.

Her books stand alone, by choice, linked only by the odd character who wanders in from an earlier story. She likes it that way, as a writer and, she adds, as a reader too.

Ask her what she’d tell someone thinking about starting, and the answer comes quickly. Enter competitions. Not only for the outside chance of winning, but for the discipline of a word count and a brief. And remember this. A manuscript only needs to land on the right desk once. “That’s all you need,” she says. “One person.”

It’s the same principle she brings to the creative writing retreats she now runs, one of them tucked into the mountains of Abruzzo, a region she talks about with real fondness. Listen to authors describe how they actually work, she tells the writers who come. There’s always something worth taking from it. Her own career remains a fairly convincing case in point.