The Banker’s Love by Daphne Sobolev, vols I & II

Set in Essex in the eighties, the narrative presents a lively, colourful, society. The framework of this book is the tale of Grace, a six-year-old girl. Grace's father, Daniel Woodhouse is an exceptionally gifted florist who got into trouble with the underworld due to his financial problems. To save his farm, Daniel asks a bank clerk, John Harvey, for a loan. At the same time, and for the same purpose, Grace searches for some long-lost treasure. Influenced by pirate books, she believes that she must find a treasure map, a compass, and a spyglass to accomplish her mission. Her pursuit of these objects stirs the lives of three people of different cultures. The first, Elisaveta is a sixty-seven-year-old lonely, respectable Ukrainian widow. Having discovered a map - with a heart-shaped mark on it - which had been given to her by a former lover, she decides to search for him abroad. The second, Alexandro Javier Estada, is an immigrant from Argentina. He is a forty-two-year-old travelling salesman of books, who is unsatisfied with his job, and wishes to the depths of his heart to find a desk job. Alexandro decides to purchase a spyglass to spy on the young woman, with whom he is secretly in love. The third person is the British chess-instructor, Michael, whose late father’s will does not leave him a penny of the family fortune unless he divorces his wife. The compass is only one of his father's belonging. Michael battles his anger towards his father, attempting to reach a resolution of his grief. In charting the adventures of Elisaveta, Alexandro, and Michael, this two-volume monograph is, above all, the story of the loan clerk, John. Gradually regaining the desire to live, which he had lost during his twenty-two years’ service for the bank, he finds the courage to love again. This new love drives him, eventually, to do all that h