My Summer of '69 - Penny Gardiner

A memoir about a tumultuous relationship in the late ’ 60s in Sitges, the Spanish coastal town where the party never stops, the champagne flows and boundaries are pushed.When Penny encountered the adventurous bar owner Tom Corley she found herself drawn to him despite her lack of experience with men. Instantly falling for the charismatic ‘ man in black’ , she eagerly embraced his carefree lifestyle filled with gambling, drinking, and wild escapades in Sitges, a vibrant Mediterranean party hub.Tom was a former US Marine with a shady past and his money-making schemes bumped up against the law, but that didn’ t matter to Penny. He had captured her heart, leading to their hasty marriage after a chance meeting on a Spanish beach in the Mediterranean.After a spell in his hometown of Dublin, they settled back in Sitges, where they ran a succession of businesses that, boom or bust, never quite managed to keep Tom out of trouble. The unpredictability of their life together kept her hooked for a decade, during which time she had two sons, until a last dodgy deal went badly wrong, and a dark undercurrent of violence finally became too much to bear.Then, for the sake of her safety, and her