A novel
Purple is the person you meet and instantly click with. The kindest, most genuine person you know. They walk into your life as if they have always been there.
A small, quiet, devastating love story about the people who walk into your life as if they had always been there, and the eight years it can take to say so.
Manarola, 2006 — London, 2014
Purple is the person you meet and instantly click with. The kindest, most genuine person you know. They walk into your life as if they have always been there.
Marco learnt that early, growing up in a village of five hundred souls and two railway tunnels, watching the summer kids pour out of the dark every June and vanish back into it every September. By sixteen he has a rule about them, and the rule has never once been wrong.
Then, on the worst day of a bad summer, a half-English girl called Viola sits down beside him on the harbour wall at Manarola. She doesn’t ask what’s wrong. She tells him he’ll be alright. And she is the only person who has ever called him by his name the way she does.
Nine weeks later she is gone without a goodbye, and all she leaves behind is a purple scarf on the warm stone of the wall.
He keeps it. Through a village that changes, a city that doesn’t care, a love that deserved better and letters that never arrive, he keeps it. Every tenth of August, when the stars fall over the church of San Lorenzo, he goes back to the wall. Every year he tells himself it is the last time.
He is wrong about that too.
Some people come. Some people go. But some just feel like home.
Two countries, one wall, eight summers
The summer kids arrive out of the tunnel, as they always do. Marco, sixteen, has a philosophy about them and a father who has stopped coming home. A sudden shower, and a girl on the platform who doesn’t run for cover.
The worst day of Marco’s summer. He goes to the harbour wall to be alone, and Viola sits down beside him with half a focaccia. She doesn’t ask what’s wrong. She tells him he’ll be alright.
The village adopts her: an old fisherman teaches her the names of the boats, an ugly stray follows her home, and Marco learns that “Purple” is not a colour but a name — and mangles it beyond repair.
Their first evening alone, on the cliff path among the padlocks. Marco tells her about his father, something he has told no one. They do not hold hands.
Anchovies and an interrogation on Nonna Ada’s rooftop. A purple scarf in Viola’s hair, and a piece of old wisdom about wishing that Marco overhears and doesn’t understand.
10 August, the rocks, the whole gang under the Perseids. Everyone makes a wish except Viola: “Some things you don’t wish for, you just know.”
The last fortnight slips away. On the final night she nearly says it. In the morning the platform is empty, and a purple scarf lies on the warm stone of the wall.
He writes to her; the letter comes back. She writes to him; her letters go nowhere. The reader reads what Marco never will, while he keeps his first August appointment with the wall.
One Tuesday in 2009, told for the only time from Viola’s side. She goes back to Manarola and sits on the wall for an hour. Two hours away, on the same afternoon, Marco takes a scarf out of a shoebox.
The 2011 flood brings Marco to Vernazza with a shovel and Viola to a television in Bristol with a pen. Then London, for both of them — twenty minutes apart, and neither knows it.
A kind woman asks what’s in the drawer, and Marco tells her the truth. The eighth San Lorenzo on the wall. This time, he decides, it really is the last.
A wet Tuesday, a queue in a Clerkenwell deli, focaccia that tastes almost like home. Behind him, a voice says his name the way only one person ever has.
Waterloo Bridge at dusk. There is no purple hour on the Thames, but there are eight years of letters to compare — and a scarf still waiting in a drawer.
Manarola out of season: grey water, an empty harbour, the wall where it all began. Some things are given back; some truths finally said.
One year later, the tenth of August, the rocks and the falling stars — and a wish that, for once, is not left unmade.
Where it began
Before it was a book, Purple was a song.
The novel grew out of my song “Purple”, and each part of the book opens with its lyrics. Hear the song that started it all.
Visit the Purple song page