Lise Ferreira

He told her not to wait. It was the only time she ever said no.

Mossel Bay, 1986. Every Monday at dawn, Callie Petrakis sits on the back stairs of her father's pizzeria. And every Monday, Tiago Freitas delivers the wood for the oven and never once looks up.

Callie is the daughter who holds everything together: Deputy Head Girl, gifted artist, and keeper of her Greek immigrant father's dream of a big, impressive life far from the harbour. Tiago is the Madeiran-Portuguese timber merchant's son, a boy of few words who writes his heart in pencil in the margins of her Jane Austen.

Their love was never the question. The question is who gets to choose Callie's life.

When his call-up papers arrive and Johannesburg calls for her, Tiago does the hardest thing a man in love can do. He lets her go.

Don't wait for me.

Twelve hundred kilometres from the sea, Callie builds the glittering life her father always wanted for her: a tower of black glass, a career on the fast track, the patient courtship of a kind man from old money. But she paints every weekend until she can't see the colours, and four years of letters, and the writing box Tiago made her, hold a truth she's never dared say out loud.

Spanning 1986 to the dawn of a new South Africa, Don't Wait for Me is a sweet, clean romance about family, home, and a love that holds, for every reader who believes some things are worth coming back for.

Sweet and clean: no spice, all heart.