Amelia Donkor

Listen to my history. My adventures are worth hearing. I have lived many lifetimes and been loved by emperors, kings and thieves. I have survived kidnap and assault. Revolution and two world wars. But this is also a love story. And the story of what we will do for those we love.

For five hundred years we've been looking at the Mona Lisa and it turns out that she's been looking right back at us. Over the centuries, few could hear her voice, but now we are let into the secret, as she tells us her story in her own words - a tale of rivalry, murder and heartbreak. And a mystery of Leonardo's greatest lost painting. Weaving through the years she takes us from the dazzling world of da Vinci's Florentine studio to the French courts at Fontainebleau and Versailles, and into the Twentieth Century.

But, always Mona Lisa returns to Leonardo himself. Most of all, this is a love story between painting and painter. Sometimes it takes an immortal to show us what it is to be human.

He thought he could set her on a better path. But they might both wander astray...Sir Gareth Ludlow never truly recovered from the death of his fiancee. Years later, a chance encounter with Amanda, a young and devastatingly pretty runaway, inspires him to try to do the right thing and to set her on a path towards a good life. But Sir Gareth has been neck-deep in a life of debauchery and hedonism ever since his fiancee's death, and Amanda's startlingly lively imagination proves to be more than he'd bargained for. As they both become increasingly entangled in Sir Gareth's scheme, it seems more and more difficult for either of them to lead the life they should...