Both a ‘rite of passage’ and a unique commentary on the social issues of a pre-feminist era without mass tourism, easy communication and the contraception pill, 1955 The Summer When…. is an honest and fun memoir of an optimistic nineteen years travelling alone across Europe in 1955!

What was it like to be an independent head-strong young woman in the fifties; before the feminist movement, the consumer boom of the Sixties, cheap air travel, universal TV and the internet? Where traditional values were still very strong and shaped female expectations? Valerie Thornhill, internationally known art historian and winner of The People’s Book Prize 2012, answers those questions as she takes readers on an incredible journey through history with her stunning new memoir 1955 The Summer When...

“The book depicts a real bid for freedom in a way that was highly controversial in the Fifties. The wide range of experiences and adventures, especially sexually, in the context of an age when women were expected to get married as virgins and create families,” says Thornhill. “This was an act of great independence and courage at a critical moment in history with the emergence of a totally new Europe. I was a young woman trying to make sense of a complicated adult world, as well as wanting to ‘get inside’ different cultures, with little preparation for it.”

1955 The Summer When... recalls the excitement and apprehension of a first year Cambridge student invited to stay with her Professor in Paris. Travelling across a continent recovering from six years of war, Valerie Thornhill’s journey is filled with fantastic adventures and formative life experiences along the way including: a dramatic scene at a bullfight in Spain; an attempt made at the Alhambra in Granada to recruit her for the white slave trade; pursued by Italian men, she dates four in one day and ends up with Francesco, a war veteran; being arrested in Milan and narrowly escaping prison; attending a literary reception in Paris where she meets some famous, avant-garde intellectuals of the day including Simone de Beauvoir, Francoise Sagan and Count Guy de Lavalliere.